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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Success. Success. Failure. Success. Failure.

That’s it, that’s my story. It’s been my heartbeat. I’m a Serial Entrepreneur with a 60% track record, which is comforting, except that I’m coming off my latest failure at Helpstream. 60% is way in excess of what most any VC ever gets….

I am fond of saying you learn a lot more from failure than success. Call it a consolation prize, but I do learn a lot from the failures, though I also learn from the successes. Since I am just off a Failure, clearly I have not yet amassed enough learnings to have a perfect picture of how to navigate the treacherous waters a startup sails on to success. Hence there are new learnings to be discussed. The Helpstream Learnings Series

After being an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, I’ve now been a part-time angel investor for 5 years and a full-time venture capitalist for the past 9 months. During that time, I’ve come to appreciate the real value that great venture capitalists provide: amazing informational awareness, comprehensive business networks, providing brand cover for companies so that they can recruit and raise more money effectively, and more.

Still, some VCs do things that I really don’t like. This post is for them.

Why do angel investors exist?

Before answering these questions, it’s useful to ask and answer a related question: why are there angels and why have they become more prominent in the last 10 years? After all, doesn’t the definition of venture capital include all of the activities that angels perform?

The answer lies in the history of technology companies and the differences between how they were built 30 years ago and how they are built now.

This discussion comes up time and time again in the eternal SaaS vs On-Premises debate. The SaaS guys (yup, that’s me) wax eloquently about all the advantages of SaaS only to have the On-Prem guys shoot us down by proclaiming SaaS companies aren’t real businesses because they can’t make a profit. The thing is, it just ain’t so.

The latest bout of this I had was amongst my Enterprise Irregulars blogging group, and comes in the aftermath of Sapphire (SAP’s User Conference), which always brings out a lot of discussions like this. Our discussion got started through Michael Krigsman’s excellent post on SAP’s continued commitment to their SaaS product, Business by Design. As Michael points out:

The economic differences between delivering software via SaaS and on-premise methods are substantial, with profound implications for how software companies optimize internal operations.

It happens all the time. I’m meeting with an entrepreneur, who is telling me about a really innovative product idea for a consumer website. And I’m liking it. We’re going back and forth on product ideas. And before I know it, we’re approaching the end of our meeting. I then ask them, “So, how are you going to acquire customers.” And that’s when it happens…The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.” As if….

In the emerging sector of Software as a Service, one of the biggest challenges for many of the top CEOs is the lack of successful role-model businesses. There are still only a handful of public pure-play SaaS businesses, and thus the body of “best practices” is very limited. Ironically, on top of this, one of the hardest things veteran software CEOs have to do when they start to run a SaaS company is to forget much of what they know about running a software company.

As we worked with our SaaS portfolio companies, it became apparent that savvy SaaS companies were following a new set of rules – most of which didn’t apply in the traditional software world, and many of which they were making up in real-time. We then set out to capture the new “best practices” of the on-demand model.

To pull these insights together, Bessemer studied over a hundred SaaS companies – both pure-plays and hybrids – and recently hosted an invitation- only SaaS CEO Summit to compare perspectives and discuss the findings. Many of the insights gained during this research and these discussions are condensed into the following list of ten new “laws” which help to govern the success of SaaS companies.

The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing offers useful, qualitative insight from today’s marketing thought leaders, basic and advanced B2B marketing best practices on must-have campaigns, and worksheets for calculating ROI and measuring the impact of nurturing done well. Use this guide as a workbook, highlight what you find inspirational, share what you learn with your colleagues, and start driving explosive revenue growth.

Josh James, CEO of Omniture (a Hummer Winblad portfolio company), gave an inspiring talk on building a SaaS company last week at the Opsource summit….

The key metric that Omniture used to decide how much gas to pour on the fire was the Magic Number.

The Magic Number

The magic number (“MN”) is a metric that can be used to tell you the health of your company from the perspective of growing monthly recurring revenue (“MRR”). It is a common mode metric to compare companies MRR scaled by sales and marketing spend. The MN provides insight into the effectiveness of previous quarter Sales and Marketing spend on MRR growth. Your MN will be penalized if the spend is wasted (bad marketing, bad sales execution), if your churn is high or if the market has issues (saturation, competitive forces). It also has a very high correlation with Q/Q growth rates so in general, high Magic Numbers are good.

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.

Professional Search Engine Optimization Guides

• SEO Basics
• Through Advanced SEO Techniques
• Written by the SEO Experts
• Difficult Concepts Explained Clearly

You may ask, why should anyone care what I (Jon Miller, VP of Marketing) have to say about demand generation? Well, at Marketo, we’ve built a world-class demand generation machine.

Now, I’m not writing this to promote Marketo, but I think we’re doing something right with our own demand generation and lead management processes. I frequently get asked to share how we achieve these marketing results, so I recently presented a fact-filled webinar titled Secret Sauce for Demand Generation: How Marketo Nurtures, Scores and Accelerates Leads through the Revenue Cycle. In order to share these lessons with as broad an audience as possible, we’ve made the webinar available anytime on-demand, without registration.

http://www.marketo.com/demo/secret-sauce/player.html

In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available in the original post.

Understanding the Design of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application
Development Platform

This paper explains the patented technology that makes the Force.com platform fast, scalable, and secure for any type of application. Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 47,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com’s foundation is a metadatadriven software architecture that enables multitenant applications.

The second article in a series about designing multi-tenant applications identifies three distinct approaches for creating data architectures. (25 printed pages), including: Three Approaches to Managing Multi-Tenant Data, Choosing an Approach, and Realizing Multi-Tenant Data Architecture.

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…

If you are new to Twitter and need a crash course, this set of links and demos will get you up to speed fast. This is the set of links that Guy Kawaski uses to demo Twitter by going down through this list to show why Twitter is such a valuable marketing tool.

Looking to build a business plan for your SaaS company, but don’t know how to create the right financial model?

Get best practices and insider tips first-hand from SaaS finance experts and actual investors on what financial metrics matter and how they affect your business plan, ability to raise capital, and long-term profitability.

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”

This new guide offers valuable insight from innovative thought leaders and provides best practices for utilizing social media marketing applications effectively.

Use the worksheets and checklists to best incorporate your social media plan and policy at your company. Also learn to measure achievements and ROI of your B2B social media marketing strategies.

Use this guide as a reference and a workbook – feel free to share with colleagues, friends and followers via Linkedin, Twitter, your corporate blog or any other social media channel!

Part 1: What is Social Media and Why Does My Business Need It?
Discover why social media is invaluable to B2B companies and what it means for your organization. Download now!
…

This post comes from reading some blog entries like the post our friend Abe Sultan of Apprenda wrote for Datamation – How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company and my own conversations with software company executives. Before anybody says it – it is not every way there is to fail at SaaS. And like any limited list covering a big subject – the items are over broad and not necessarily indicative of the most common ways to fail.

But that said, these are the things that really irritate me and I’m sure irritate those who have lived these errors – as happens in the life of an entrepreneur. So, if you are or are considering offering a product with the SaaS business and delivery model, you might want to consider about the common trip points mentioned in this article…

As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players

1) Collaboration Wars

2) Business-Oriented Social Networks

3) Platforms-as-a-Service Wars

4) Cloud Governance…

Steve Blank is a respected voice in Silicon Valley for good reason. He writes and speaks from a deep well of experience and insight. I’ve never found anyone who could put the current trend towards the “consumerization” of online software into an actionable context better.

What I’ve linked to for this “classic blog post” is actually not one post but instead a whole category of Steve’s posts that highlight an approach to product development that is strongly user-driven and fits particularly well for the Internet delivery model of SaaS products. It is a key part of the whole “Lean Start Up” philosophy that is gaining a lot of attention because it answers the questions around what is a viable roadmap for a SaaS product.

If you’re developing or considering a SaaS product, I strongly suggest sampling the posts in this series – there is a lot of good information here.

[Recommended by By Michael Dunham at http://blog.sciodev.com ]