The 2010 Private SaaS Vendors Benchmarking Report breaks out comprehensive financial and operating benchmarks for private SaaS vendors with 2009 revenues under $10M and between $10M & $50M. With 150 detailed benchmarks, the Private SaaS Benchmarking Report covers critical operating measures such as CMRR (contracted monthly recurring revenues) for the last month of the fiscal year, net new customers, customer acquisition costs, customer maintenance costs, average deal sizes, customer renewal rates by number of customers and by dollar rate of renewal, as well as hosting expenses.

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The BridgeGroup recently surveyed 115 North American technology companies with a special focus on SaaS inside sales metrics and sales compensation for SaaS companies. The report covers SaaS benchmarks like organization size, average sale price, quotas and comp, hunting vs. farming, trial conversion, and even calls per day. The report is free, but does require registration.

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The Periodic Table is a summary sheet based on data collected from The Bridge Group, Inc.’s Inside Sales and Lead Gen Metrics & Compensation reports. The reports are the result of surveys with 125 technology companies in North America.

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A free guide to leveraging Inside Sales as an engine for growth.

In today’s challenging market, you’ve already cut budgets and headcount to the bone. This ebook shares key factors in building highly effective Inside Sales teams, including:

• Which Model is Right for Me?
• Who Should Run the Group?
• Best Practice Interviewing Techniques
• Technology & Tools to Maximize Success

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This SaaS Metrics blog post looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. The post provides a considerable amount of detailed information that should be of great assistance to anyone running, or looking start, a SaaS business.

Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful, so the goal of the post is to provide a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business. For each metric, the post also looks at what is actionable.

The post starts by looking at the high level goals of a SaaS business: Profitability, Cash, Growth and Market Share, and drills down into the component parts that drive each of these. Key metrics that are covered include cost of customer acquisition (CAC), lifetime value of the customer (LTV), months to recover CAC, Churn, sales funnel metrics, etc.

The coverage of what metrics are needed is comprehensive and detailed.

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Compensating the sales force is a difficult task and the key is usually to keep things simple, so that each sales rep knows what he needs to optimize to make more money at the end of the quarter. For SaaS companies, we found that MRR is the best metric on which to base sales commissions. While it may make sense to offer very slight adjustments for favorable payment terms and one time revenue, net additions to MRR should dominate the sales rep’s thoughts. The reps’ top 3 priorities should be (i) MRR, (ii) MRR, and (iii) MRR.

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Quick video presentation of the challenges existing enterprise software providers face in transitioning to SaaS, cloud computing and managed services markets, including the 5C’s of Failure: Company Culture, Cannibalization, Commoditization, Channel Conflict and Customer Confusion…

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Presentation from 2008 SaaS Summit that covers Omnitures stages of evolution and introduces the “SaaS Magic Number”

Omniture Stages of Evolution: Product – Sell like crazy; Prove you can sell; – Build team; QBSRs – Retain; QBSRs – Marketing; QBSRs – Efficiency of Hardware; QBSRs – More Engineers and more QBSRs – Most Important Investment Metric – “Magic Number”

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