OPEXEngine | SaaS Articles

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SaaS Startup Strategy—Three SaaS Sales Models

Choosing the right go-to-market sales model for your SaaS startup can be a make it or break it decision. Choose right and you grow smoothly from seed funding to A round to B round and beyond. Choose wrong and you spend precious cycles chasing your tail as cash runs out.

June 14, 2018

What’s Changed and What’s the Same for 2018 SaaS IPOs

The 2018 SaaS IPO companies and companies rumored to be considering an IPO this year all have a few common characteristics.

June 13, 2018

What the Heck is the Difference Between Bookings, Billings, and Recognized Revenue for SaaS Companies?

SaaS companies track the monies earned for selling products and services with a variety of different metrics, and it can be confusing.

June 5, 2018

Case Study: Using Benchmarking to Drive Growth

Intelex, a Canadian-based global leader in Environment, Health, Safety and Quality (EHSQ) SaaS, with offices in Toronto, Denver, and the UK, uses OPEXEngine’s SaaS Benchmarking platform, BenchmarkEngine™, together with Adaptive Insights budgeting and planning solution to drive operational analysis enabling fast growth.

May 29, 2018

Why Benchmarking Hosting Expense Matters to Gross Margin and Average Cost of Service

SaaS companies and investors want to know what the cost of software delivery and after-sales support after acquiring a customer will be for the company. There is no sense in investing large amounts of resources into acquiring customers if the average cost of service to maintain the customer after the acquisition is too high.

May 22, 2018

How One Successful SaaS Vendor is Evolving Its Model

Last week, Hubspot announced strong Q1’18 results of 39% revenue growth and 44% customer growth. These are great growth numbers, but more importantly, Hubspot announced a major evolution in its growth strategy. Here is how one successful SaaS vendor is evolving its model.

May 15, 2018

Is Your Sales Organization High Functioning or Not?

Sales is the revenue engine of any B-2-B SaaS company and thus absolutely critical to company growth. Sales is also often the biggest single departmental expenditure in the company – another reason why Sales efficiency is critical to ensure companies are getting the best productivity for their investment in the Sales organization and everything the company does to support Sales.

May 8, 2018

SaaS G&A Expense is Surprisingly High

SaaS G&A expense is surprisingly high. Unlike traditional software companies where G&A expense was expected to be in the 12-14% of revenue range at the time a company went public and then drop to 8-10%, SaaS companies present G&A expense between about 15% to 20%, and sometimes more, of revenue. Why is this and what are the benchmarks?

April 30, 2018

Zuora, Powering the Subscription Economy, IPO Jumps 43% Based on Strong Operating Metrics

Subscription revenue management SaaS vendor Zuora’s IPO on Thursday, priced at $14, closed at $20 and valued the company at $2B. 2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for B-2-B SaaS IPOs: Dropbox and Zuora already have listed, Docusign, Pluralsight, Smartsheet have filed and Qualtrics, Apttus, Github, SurveyMonkey and Slack are expected to file this year as well. It’s worth taking a look at Zuora’s operating metrics over the 3 years leading up to last week’s IPO as an example of a successful enterprise SaaS company.

April 17, 2018