Getting paid in advance is really smart idea if you can do it without impacting bookings, as it can provide the cash flow that you need to cover your cash problem

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It is often worth providing good financial incentives in the form of discounts to encourage this behavior. The metric that we use to track how well your sales force is doing in this area is Months up Front.

Getting paid more upfront usually also helps lower churn. This happens because the customer has made a greater commitment to your service, and is more likely to spend the time getting it up and running. You also have more time to overcome issues that might arise with the implementation in the early days. Calculating LTV and CAC

The Metric “Months up Front” has been used at both HubSpot and NetSuite in the past as a way to incent sales people to get more paid up front when a new customer is signed. However asking for more money up front may turn off certain customers, and result in fewer new customers, so be careful how you balance these two conflicting goals.

More SaaS + Software Stats

The fastest growing SaaS companies scale their organizations rapidly, growing their teams by an average of 56% each year

SAAS companies need to track the number of visitors, trials and closed deals; And also track the conversion rates, with the goal of improving those over time

Increases in revenue growth rates drive twice as much market-capitalisation gain as margin improvements for companies with less than $4 billion in revenues

Unlike many other industries, if a software company grows at only 20%, it has a 92% chance of ceasing to exist within a few years

Moving from $1.5 million with an eye towards $10 million in ARR is a tough a task and will take an excellent VP of sales to get you there

More than two thirds of SAAS companies experienced annual churn rates of 5% or higher

High-growth companies are 8X more likely to reach $1 billion in revenues than those growing less than 20%.

It’s 9x cheaper to retain existing customers than acquire new customers: costing $0.13 to acquire any additional dollar of revenue

The median startup spends 92% of first year revenue on customer acquisition, taking 11-months to payback their Customer Acquisition Cost

26% of SAAS companies with at least $15MM in GAAP revenue had a revenue growth rate + EBITDA margin of 40% or higher.

More Growth Strategy Stats

80% of venture capital investments take place in the enterprise

Account Churn Rate (ACR) = customers at beginning of month – customers at the end of month / customers at beginning of month

Gross dollar churn among companies with an internet go-to-market strategy saw a meaningful increase, up from 8% in 2015

55% of SaaS companies rate Customer Retention as the key metric to measure

More than 1/2 of SAAS companies increased their spending on customer retention last year

The median monthly revenue churn for large SaaS companies is 0.75%, translating into an annual revenue churn rate of 10%

Analyzed by contract value, field sales are primarily evident for companies with median deals over $25K. Inside sales strategies are most popular for companies with $1K-$25K median deal sizes

Sony’s PlayStation brand had accumulated approximately 38.57 million fans on the social network

The venture-backed companies that were acquired most often had a 7 percent share of female execs, as opposed to 3 percent at unsuccessful (unacquired) firms

All types of investment have grown, year-on-year, with the biggest growth during the seed stage of financing