September 4, 2025
Evaluate your SaaS go-to-market strategy with this 20-question GTM audit checklist. Assess sales, marketing, customer success, and data alignment for growth and scalability.
About 3/4ths of Sales expense is spent on sales compensation. Companies have always spent huge amounts of time and resource fine tuning their sales structure and organization but in the SaaS world, it is even more complex. SaaS companies have to compensate for recurring revenues, renewals, find the right mix of incentives, targets and sales support for their market, as well as to achieve maximum performance. Constantly fine-tuning all these moving parts can lead companies to miss the forest for the trees and lose sight of how it all adds up.
Every CFO conference that I’ve been to in the past 5 years stressed the emergence of the CFO as a strategic leader of the company. Study after study affirms that today’s CEOs expect CFOs, especially in the tech sector, play a strategic role driving company growth rather than just accounting for past performance and policing company spending. And, now G&A expenses are increasing for SaaS companies.
There are millions, okay, hundreds, of benchmarks floating around these days. Sales productivity should be a, b or c funnel conversion rates are typically such and such a percent, or churn rates have to be no more than x or your company is in big trouble. Whatever the metric, someone has a definitive answer for what it should be. So how do you get the most out of your benchmarking sales and marketing operations?
Who does sales ops report to within your organization? According to Lauren Kelley, your company’s sales ops may be sitting in the wrong department. Kelley is the CEO and Founder of OPEXEngine, a member-based SaaS benchmarking company. She was previously the SVP of sales and operations at ATG, later acquired by Oracle, and also spent two years at a Boston-area venture fund evaluating potential investments. She often had trouble accessing the metrics she needed in her past positions. Because of this void in the market, Kelley founded OPEXEngine to help data-driven, high performing software and SaaS companies benchmark their own growth.
If a company can sell 1.5 deals in the time it previously took to sell one deal, you have 50% more revenue. All other things being equal (ie., you don't increase churn, increase discounting, etc), if you tighten up your sales cycle, you’ll increase revenue.
Benjamin Graham, father of value investing, famously described the stock market as a "voting machine." His star protege, Warren Buffett, would later expand that to "a voting machine over the short term, and a weighing machine over the long term." What the heck was Graham talking about, and why did Mr. Buffett feel the need to expand? Do these assertions provide any help when looking at the state of the SaaS market for the stocks of SaaS companies?
Will risk averse investors in both the private (VC and PE) and public markets this year impact SaaS operating benchmarks like revenue growth, profitability, hiring and a host of other operating metrics in 2016?
In a recent forum dedicated to software and SaaS Finance leaders, organized by the SIIA and sponsored by OPEXEngine, Netsuite, Intacct and Grant Thornton, one of the best discussions dealt with preparing for and managing the optimal M&A exit for your company, with CFOs from acquired companies and M&A advisors from Grant Thornton.
We frequently have customer conversations where we discuss how things are moving around a SaaS income statement; hosting costs into COGS, headcount from R&D to other departments, things like that. Meanwhile, in another part of The Cloud, there are some large, important blocks of capital moving between a companies balance sheet.
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