Statistic Info

In the past, we have benchmarked the revenue per employee of large publicly traded SaaS companies and determined that the average is about $200k of revenue per person. But, that analysis examined revenue per employee that only one point in time.

High-growth companies scale their teams very quickly. In fact, the companies in the sample set grew their teams by 56% annually over five years, which nets out to about 8.5x growth, from 204 employees to 1750 employees on the median.

Despite the massive growth of these organizations, the best companies are able to maintain or even accelerate their revenue per employee. In fact, increases in revenue per employee as a company scales is an incredibly positive sign of the health of the business. It indicates that the company is achieving economies of scale. Those economies of scale may exist as a consequence of a strong brand, monopoly-like characteristics within their market segment, improving sales efficiency, increases in contract size, better rates of customer upsells, etc. But in all cases, it’s a hallmark of a company whose economics are improving with time.

Tomasz Tonguz

More SaaS + Software Stats

Because of the losses in the early days, which get bigger the more successful the company is at acquiring customers, it is much harder for management and investors to figure out whether a SaaS business is financially viable.

SaaS organizations are now operating in over 100 countries

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = sum of all sales & marketing expenses/ number of new customers added

Investment in marketing automation tools is expected to reach $25 billion by the year 2023

The metrics that matter for each sales funnel, vary from one company to the next depending on the steps involved in the funnel

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

After $10M in ARR, the median growth rate slows to just under 50%

The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results.

The median SaaS business loses about 10% of its revenue to churn each year and that works out to about 0.83% revenue churn a month

The fastest growing SAAS companies averaged $250k in MRR and were only losing around 3.2% of that revenue each month to churn

More Growth Strategy Stats

In 2018, the revenue of General Dynamics amounted to nearly 36.2 billion U.S. dollars.

In contrast to these, the median annual churn rate for smaller, private SaaS companies with less than $10M in revenue is 20%

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = sum of all sales & marketing expenses/ number of new customers added

If a software company grows at 20% annually, it has a 92% chance of ceasing to exist within a few years

The average Quick Ratio of fastest growing SaaS companies (those with a CAGR of over 50%) is 3.9: generating $3.9 in revenue for every $1 lost to revenue churn

Japanese company Hitachi accounted for three percent of the world’s market for diagnostic imaging in 2017.

In 2017, IBM generated 37.8 billion U.S. dollars in global IT services revenue, making it the largest IT services company in the world in terms of net sales

The fastest growing SaaS companies raise an average of $9.5M in Series A funding

To establish a revenue or lead-commitment based on your funnel metrics and revenue-growth goals, work backward from the gross revenue amount that marketing is responsible for generating (generally around 40%)

At Facebook, 15 percent of tech roles are staffed by women