VP Data and Operations
@repvue
| Talks about B2B Sales Org KPIs | Enterprise Software / TMT Alternative Data | Attempting to separate 🌾 | Member WPN
#GoPack
🐺
Let's pretend for a moment that Software isn't Dead...
and that it's just really cheap right now.
Now let's pretend you valued the Health and Performance of the GTM as part of your investment thesis
Where might you look?
Does Private Equity really know how to run a SaaS business? ....specifically do they know how to run GTM for SaaS businesses?
Let's take a look back at how Coupa, Zendesk and Qualtrics are fairing in the hands of their news owners, Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake, Hellman & Friedman
The Senior Enterprise Account Executive
Back row of the quarterly All Hands
First time in office in months
Being told RTO is mandatory
Knowing he won’t comply
Knowing they won’t touch him
Q2-24 is in the books and Cybersecurity Quota Attainment continues to push lower - clocked in at 36.44% in Q2 - the lowest of any sub-industry since Q1-22
Not only is Quota Attainment in this vertical abysmal - but Lead Flow sentiment is the lowest among the the other 8
At the start of this year I made a goal to really lean into X and engage with the SaaS/Software/Sales community here to learn and share some of the valuable work we're doing at
@repvue
Quick shout out to some of the folks that have helped along the way and keep this place
We all know that one 'job hopper' friend... the one who successfully managed to get 20%-30% bumps in comp every time they switched orgs - and switched every 12-18 months for 5-10 straight years.
For the ones who stick it out, jealousy, FOMO, we've all felt it to some degree
But
In SaaS land - everything is just a little bit stuck in the mud...
Below is look at US SaaS Quota Carrying Reps - with ACVs ranging from 25K to 300K, Sales Cycles ranging from 21 to 360 days, Base Comp ranging from 50K to 250K who rated on RepVue as 'Current Employee' over the
🚨ATTENTION ALL SOFTWARE SALES REPS 🚨
Maximum Earning Potential Utility is reached at 100K-150K in average deal size.
Stop chasing 250K deals - find that sweet spot 🤑
Good luck out there!
Happy Memorial Day Weekend! 🇺🇸
N = 145,559 AEs in Software, source
@repvue
👀 $100M+ ARR, 30%+ Growth Private Software Co's - via
@SapphireVC
"Market Memo"
I ran through 2-year charts of secondary market trading via
@noticedotco
-> proxy for IPO demand = looks "neutral" or balanced
1/3 - great trendlines, window open
1/3 - flat
1/3 - down charts
You're looking at SaaS GTM metrics all wrong.
Here are the 5 most important longitudinal
@repvue
KPIs I look at to analyze the Health & Performance of SaaS Sales Organizations.
a 🧵...
Saw an article (link in comments) yesterday that estimated Grafana Labs is growing Revenue at ~69% YoY! and already hit $270m ARR
Kinda blew my mind 🤯especially in contrast to the deceleration in top-line growth at comps like $DT and $DDOG growing in the 20% range and obviously
Want to be an Enterprise Account Executive?
trying to secure the bag 💰
sure, we all do.
...but it's a grind.
We surveyed 64,921 Account Executives in Tech who sell to the SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise and this is what we saw...🧵
Interesting view at the HR/Payroll space when looking at lead flow sentiment among sales reps at public vs private providers
the 'Lead Flow Sentiment' among publics ( $PAYC $PAYX $PCTY $PYCR $ADP ) all move together and tightly in the 1.5 - 2.5 range ... not very good (trending
🚨ATTENTION ALL SALES LEADERS 🚨
At all costs, please for the love of shareholder value, create a sales org that predictably can get at least 50% of your team to reach their individual quotas.
That's it.
Low bar right?
Wrong - only 25% of Sales Orgs are doing this.
The
$CRWD reporting $218m in Net New ARR
how might they have gotten there?
Approx 2200 GTM professionals - so let's assume 40% of them have quotas principally aligned to new logos
Roughly 880 reps carrying a blended annual quota of $1m each (SMB lower, ENT higher) - so $250K each
We spend a lot of time looking at and talking about Quota Attainment - but if you look further up funnel, at the Inbound Lead Flow sentiment score we collect at
@repvue
- I think you can get an interesting read on demand for different SaaS verticals, and its pretty telling...
New Q1-24 RepVue Cloud Sales Index report drops this week.
Macro pulse on trends within Cybersecurity, Data & AI, DevOps and Developer Tools, Sales Tools, Marketing Tools, HR Tools, Finance & ERP, Productivity and Collaboration Tools, and Vertical Industry Software.
Quota
I keep coming back to the stark difference in GTM KPIs between the incumbent public HR/Payroll providers and the newcomer private entrants - it seems to me to be the widest 'gap' between public/private GTM KPIs in all of software. I know they generally serve different end
Quota Attainment 📈
Lead Flow Sentiment 📈
PMF Sentiment 📈
RepVue Score 📈
The Sales Org KPIs at $GME are rock solid.
I've been trying to tell yall.
Folks just now waking up to it.
I really don't know if I can keep giving away this much alpha.
Quota Attainment within our Cybersecurity Benchmark continues to print new lows - half way through Q2 and less than 36% of sellers are able to meet or exceed their quota. All other SaaS sub-industries have put in a bottom 2 or 3 Qs ago - Cyber heads lower. Why?
Excited to release the
@repvue
Q2-2024 Cloud Sales Index report today!
Check it out below:
TL;DR - Quota Attainment is stuck moving sideways, multiple sub-industries hit new lows, very little to get excited about...apart from maybe Data & AI?
About:
In a past life, about 6 years ago, I used Monday $MNDY and loved the product. Used it for Project Management workflows, planning, data sharing, etc. I think we paid ~ $1,000 a year for a handful of seats, never talked to a sales rep.
Today, at
@repvue
I've got a different view
Quick reminder to folks that CloudFlare $NET has seen its RepVue Score (Health and Performance of Sales Orgs) drop quarter over quarter from 87% percentile to 50% percentile over the past 8 quarters.
In absolute terms it has fallen 9,252 spots to rank on the median across the
Found this really interesting 💡
Look at the change in Average Deal Size by division as you scale up across RepVue Scores...
Just reinforces the fact that Average Deal Size is everything for sellers.
Higher Average Deal Size leads to higher comp, higher comp (generally) leads
In an increasingly tough and challenging space - Wiz sales reps seem to think Wiz has something figured out...
See the only increasing line?
The blue one?
The one at the top of the heap?
...That's Wiz
'GTMomentum' is worth a premium
It looks to me that it's IMPOSSIBLE to accelerate revenue growth YoY in SaaS without having a GTM machine that consistently allows >=50% of your quota carrying sales reps to attain or exceed their personal quota
To make this point, going to deep dive into $OKTA and $NOW 🧵
Gong has such an interesting Sales Org story.
Gang busters in 2021, off the charts Quota Attainment
Quota Attainment begins to struggle
Got out past their ski's a bit, over capacity
Quota Attainment bottoms
RIF follows
Quota Attainment buoys post RIF
measured re-investment
Most Sales Organizations are performing worse than they were a year ago.
The RepVue Score is an aggregate measure from the sentiment of sellers within the sales organization that quantifies the health and performance of the sales organization.
Below is a look between June 24
$CFLT
This is an interesting one, given the restructuring of the comp plan in late 23 to more of a consumption based model.
From the data we're seeing and the reviews we're collecting its looks like Top Earner Potential in the Enterprise was ~900K in 2023 - and only ~725K thus
I was wondering how
@wiz_io
felt bullish enough to turn down what looked like a pretty aggressive offer from $GOOGL (if all of that reporting was true)
Digging in a little bit - it looks like it might be because Wiz might be...winning? in the crowded CNAPP space.
...at least
Heading down to Pinehurst this morning for the U.S. Open, so golf on the brain.
Here are some Professional Golfer to SaaS comps:
DJ - $DOCU Peaked in Covid, coasting towards early retirement
Tiger - $CRM The Goat, but not what it once was one
Brooks - $PCOR Blue collar, shows
Stating the obvious, but the
@repvue
data backs it up.
$ZM is stuck in the mud.
Sales Org Capacity - Flat YoY
Sales Org Performance - Flat YoY
NRR - 99%?
Guided to....<1% YoY Rev Growth...probably looking at 1.5% print
... it does print cash 💵, so there is that I guess.
In SaaS, a pretty tight trend line looking at RepVue Score vs Multiple (EV/NTM Revenue)
...that is if you exclude $DDOG, $NET, $PLTR 🧐
RepVue Score = Health and Performance of the Sales Org
makes sense to me, quality GTM orgs = premium
If I was an 'average' Account Executive comparing offers to join the Mid-Market teams at Datadog vs New Relic this is why I would turned down the offer with an OTE worth 35K more! a 🧵...
Early still, but we recently added Business Units to our data collection process for some orgs to get a better read into the separate sales orgs and cultures in larger companies. $MSFT for example - Azure quota attainment ~65% vs Modern Work ~48%.
Was looking into $PCOR yesterday and found this really interesting...
% of Team Quota Attainment for the 8Qs from Q123 - Q424 is correlated .978 with Net New Customers reported.
Does that suggest that new logos are the primary driver of the comp plan / quota?
With Gross
A lot has happened in the world of sales in last 365 days.
Of the 25,000 Sales Orgs we track at
@repvue
these 8 orgs have experienced the biggest moves in RepVue Score, 4 to upside 📈 and 4 to downside 📉
$ZIP $CARG $NET $PSTG $AMPL $INTU $WKME $PATH
Lets take a look at what
Been playing with some derivatives within our dataset. OTE x 5 is proxy for Quota, Quota / ACV is deals needed to hit quota. Sales Cycle Length (Days) x Deals Needed / 365 is proxy for frequency needed of closed deals. Proxy / Sales Cycle Length is assumed win rate. (i.e. I
$NET - Inbound Lead Flow Sentiment among sellers in Q2 was up 25.5% YoY. That, in combination with Q2-24 marking the first reversal in a long trend of declining quota attainment, maybe some positive signs to give confidence behind raising outlook.
The slow down in all things GTM at $OKTA seems particularly pronounced to my eye relative to the general slow down across most all of Software.
In Fiscal Q1 23
Quota Attainment = 57.7%
Lead Flow Sentiment = 3.33
PMF Sentiment = 4.69
Culture and Leadership Sentiment = 3.69
Not sure $CRM has the best track record of 'realizing synergies' with their M&A...at least not with their 'Salesforce'
Salesforce, Slack, Mulesoft, Tableau all still function with effectively separate GTM teams / motions. If there was ever a place to 'realize synergies' wouldnt
I'm growing more and more intrigued with the ratio between ACV and Sales Cycle Length, feels like its a good proxy for 'Deal Efficiency'
Here is $CRM over the last few quarters - split by Division (Enterprise, Mid-Market, SMB)
SMB holding flat, Enterprise and Mid-Market
Absolutely wild if true. Lacework would sell for $200M to Wiz, and in their last round, they were valued at $8.3B. That's not a sharp discount; that's dramatic erosion.
Digging into $APPF a little bit...
according to a sales rep review in October 23 "leadership has restructured quotas for a target of 25% attainment"
another sales rep review in July 24 "company wide quota attainment is less than 25%"
according to aggregated '% of Team Quota
Quick reminder to folks that CloudFlare $NET has seen its RepVue Score (Health and Performance of Sales Orgs) drop quarter over quarter from 87% percentile to 50% percentile over the past 8 quarters.
In absolute terms it has fallen 9,252 spots to rank on the median across the
$DDOG reported a ~26.7% YoY Revenue Growth last week.
Sales Org Capacity over the same period was up ~10%
Sales Org 'Performance' (
@repvue
Quota Attainment as proxy) was flat over the same period
NRR over the same period was 'mid-110%s'
That all kinda squares doesn't it?
A snippet from the March
@repvue
SaaS Sales Performance Index. Couple of call outs when you look at company Head Count change and Quota Attainment over the last 6 months.
#SaaS
$TWLO $TOST $CXM
Using Q1-23 as a benchmark - below is the change in both Sales Org Capacity (h/t
@RevelioLabs
) and Sales Org Performance (as measured in % Team Quota Attainment from survey data collected on
@repvue
)
The absolute performance obviously matters here - big difference to revenue
Over the last 14 months we've collected nearly 50,000 free-text written reviews from Sales Professionals.
In late June of 2023 we started collecting free-text written qualitative reviews of Sales Orgs. This is an optional written review provided in addition to the structured
IF
Quota Attainment is flat to down
AND
Quota Carrying Sales Rep (Capacity) is flat to down
AND
NRR is down to sub 100%
THEN
Growth will close to and go through 0
$ZS reporting after the bell today.
Positive trend in GTM performance - eclipsing Q423 levels
Continued investment in GTM capacity - up 13% YoY
Guided to approx 24-25% YoY top line revenue growth
They typically beat in the 3-5% range in recent Qs
Will check back in after
You know what's bullish AF
when your sales reps think you have improving PMF
$ADBE +10.6% PMF sentiment Q1 24 YoY
give the troops some actual AI features to go sling and see what happens
12 Month look back at the change in RepVue Score.
Stand-outs:
$NET deteriorating
$PSTG entering elite tier
view RepVue Score as the aggregate Health and Performance of the Sales Organization
< 5% of over 24,000 orgs on
@repvue
score 90+
Excited to release the RepVue Cloud Sales Index Report for Q4 23. We broke down 207 Cloud Sales Orgs into 9 Sub-industries and measured Quota Attainment, Deal Size, and Sales Cycle Length trends to get a macro view on the state of sales.
N = 28,000
$NOW has a really impressive Sales Org. A RepVue Score of 90.07 makes it the
#1
overall Sales Org for Large Sized Companies, and
#4
Sales Org for Public Companies.
Lets take a closer look... 🧵
Top 10 public tech companies by RepVue score vs. bottom 10 public companies by RepVue score (min 150 submissions). The organizational sentiment of sales professionals, believe it or not, is generally going to be a good indicator of what's really happening in there.
As
@repvue
continues to grow and reach more and more sales people, we're also getting more and more continued adoption from sales reps that are leaving their third, fourth, fifth survey on the site re-rating their experience in their current role.
One interesting use case this
Spent the last two days in NYC at the Neudata conference and running around the city talking to clients and prospects. Here are the 7 things I learned:
1. Allowing 30 mins between meetings across town is a terrible idea
2. Very few folks have good B2B data/insights outside
It can be a grind as an Enterprise Account Executive in Tech Sales....just make sure you find a role where you can smash your Quota - if you can't, very likely your total comp crushing it in a Mid-Market or even in an SMB closing role could still exceed that of a struggling
$IOT has maintained Sales Rep Quota Attainment at Enterprise, Mid-Market, and SMB >60% WHILE adding capacity to their GTM team by approx 20% in the L12M
Hard to do.
Well done!
$IOT killed it.
Quarter 6% ahead on revenue. Large EBIT beat. Annual revenue guide 2.4% ahead. EBIT well ahead.
Congrats shareholders. May have to add this to the coverage network.
We’ve heard from over 500 AEs at $CRM in the last 180 days and over 200 in the last 50 days. L6M Quota attainment, product market fit, and leas flow sentiment trends coming later this week from
@repvue
#SaaS
#CRM
$CRM
$PANW reporting after the close today...
Story here looks like fiscal Q4-23 marked the bottom and the reversal of a downward trend on most of the metrics we look at
@repvue
Quota Attainment - up 8% YoY, exceeds the cybersecurity benchmark by 6%
Lead Flow Sentiment - up 23%
The Thesis: ... (a 🧵)
Do companies that are showing material improvement in the Health and Performance of their GTM orgs (RepVue Score) perform better in the public markets?
(1/5)
$ZS $ASAN $GTLB
Using the YoY Revenue Growth KPI as the target for forecasting, this is the approach that I've been messing around with, maybe dumb luck that it kinda works - but it also kinda works...
Idea is to use the same Q a year prior as a baseline of performance, the
Sales Org Capacity x Quota x Performance = Sales Org 'Output'
Below is a look at the relative rate of change in Sales Org 'Output' from $MNDY $ASAN $SMAR and $WRIKE
i.e. Monday's org can produce 30% more than it could 2 years ago
Sure Asana is outpacing Smartsheet - but this
Ok
@Kellblog
, putting
@repvue
spin on this..
If I'm following:
1. Upper Right could be viewed, good sales orgs that folks love
2. Upper Left could be viewed, good sales orgs that folks don't love yet
3. Lower Right could be viewed, ok sales orgs that folks still love
Product Market Fit.
The
#1
most important attribute of a Product/Org for Sellers (we know we asked 250K of them) - and arguably even more important in the CyberSecurity sector of SaaS.
If you lose PMF, when the stakes are so high to your customers, you'll soon feel that pain
In the realm of B2B Seller Sentiment, Compensation, and Performance data -
@repvue
has amassed nearly 300K ratings from sellers, 40K free text reviews, combined for nearly 10million time-seriable data points - x-ref that with company metadata on over 27,000 public and private
Really good stuff here
It's becoming really clear that understanding the Sales Org HC and the composition of it, specifically the QBSRs, the Quota Capacity those heads represent, and then the relative performance of that capacity as measured through our surveys of those QBSRs is
One of the first things I learned about SaaS businesses in the early 2000s was that at a constant state of revenue addition (even if you're adding customers every quarter), your growth will revert to zero. It will drop below zero given a persistent negative NRR, given the
Inbound Lead Flow sentiment from Reps is a leading indicator to % of Team Quota Attainment.
Here is a look at the last 27 months (since Jan 2022)
Inbound Lead Flow sentiment led the way down from Q4 2021 highs to a Q2 2023 bottom, and has turned the corner back to the upside.
@BrianLaManna_
@repvue
We get hit up all the time from orgs saying 'how do I take control of this page and remove these reviews, etc , how do increase my RepVue Score?' ... well they can't. You want a better RepVue Score? do better.
Appreciate the shout out!
Really interesting conversation around 'the death of software' on this episode of
@BG2Pod
with
@altcap
and
@bgurley
... particularly these snippets from $CRM and $PATH caught my eye. Checks out with the
@repvue
survey data we're seeing from sales reps at these orgs wrt sales
I guess Thoma Bravo sees the opportunity to turn things around?
Here is $DARK historical quota attainment relative to the entire Cybersecurity sector ... just a perpetual laggard.
RepVue Score of 73.45 places them in the 24% percentile in terms of the Health of Performance
$DOCU $IOT $MDB - 3 orgs we have great coverage on
Participation on
@repvue
from the GTM team:
DocuSign - 1,562 Ratings
Samsara - 952 Ratings
MongoDB - 936 Ratings
From what we can measure via our RepVue Score - think CARFAX for the Health and Performance of the Sales Org
Early still, but we recently added Business Units to our data collection process for some orgs to get a better read into the separate sales orgs and cultures in larger companies. $MSFT for example - Azure quota attainment ~65% vs Modern Work ~48%.
Was just poking around with some $PANW salary data.
Can someone explain to me why AEs in the US are consistently 1:2 base:OTE (150k/300k) but in the UK they're consistently 2:3 base:OTE (100k/150k)?
(
@thedealdirector
maybe??)
Looks like this isn't just the norm at PA but most
Where does $ADBE capture the most value and ride the AI momentum?
Digital Media: Creative Cloud
Where does $ADBE add the most net new ARR?
Digital Media: Creative Cloud
Where do $ADBE sales reps find the most success with 63% of the team able to hit or exceed quota?