Only 41% of SaaS Companies Price by Seat Now; Plus Weekly SaaS News and Updates

David Skok of Matrix Partners and KeyBanc have been doing an incredible SaaS startup survey for many, many years and the latest edition is out here. A couple of points jumped out to us: #1. Only 41% of the SaaS companies in the survey use per-seat pricing.

Unpaid pilots almost never work. Usually, they are a sign of a weak VP of Sales (who can’t close), or founders just trying everything possible (which isn’t all bad). A short, paid pilot is a great way for a customer to force a new vendor to prove themselves. This and more advice from the SaaStr community on pricing.

Gorgias is the leading contact center for e-commerce and it’s been a fun one to track at SaaS, from 1,000 to 3,000 to now 7,000 customers. Their CEO will join us at SaaSr Scale 2021 on December 15 to talk about using data to get to 10,000 SMB customers! We asked Aasif Osmany to share his learnings as a top-performing SMB VP of Sales.

The “Magic Number” is one of those metrics in SaaS that has always sort of vexxed me. Magic Number is your growth in ARR over a quarter divided by the sales and marketing spend in the prior quarter. Generally, anything >1 is seen as healthy if you are venture-backed, and anything > 1.5 is often seen as perhaps too capital efficient. If you are well-funded, 0.75 is often seen as fine.

The other day Brendon Cassidy, the first head of sales at LinkedIn and the first VP of Sales at $10B Talkdesk, Adobe Sign / EchoSign, and more — and now co-CEO of Cosell — and I caught on what’s changing in the Sales Playbook for 2022.