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Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the stock market, the economy, and geopolitics, always a dangerous combination. I’ve come across two charts that I have been wondering about.

The first comes from Bloomberg via the BEA. It shows consumer savings rates have catapulted to the highest level ever measured. Meanwhile, consumer spending has fallen in parallel.

Consumer spending in the US accounts for 68% of GDP The question is then: how do consumers change their spending habits over the next quarter?

Yesterday, we shared the Top 10 Learnings from the 2020 Redpoint GTM Survey at SaaS Office Hours. The presentation is embedded below. It contains data on go to market team structure, performance by sales function, marketing spend benchmarks, and customer success priorities.

I want to thank Nick Giometti who parsed and processed the data and taught me (an R user) a lot about python and pandas along the way. Thanks to his work, we have some terrific insights to share. I also want to thank everyone contributed data. The full transcript is here.

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how do teams grow as a startup scales?

We can derive the table above if we look over the entire respondent base and bucket headcount by ARR. The median startup with between 1-5M in ARR will have 12 engineers, 6 in sales and 3 in marketing.

This post is part of a series leading up to SaaS Office GTM Edition on June 24 in which we’re reviewing the results of the 2020 Redpoint GTM survey. Today, we’re answering the question: how should you structure your sales teams for maximum performance?

First, let’s introduce a concept called span of control. A span of control of 7 means, on average, each manager has seven people reporting to her. I’ve seen teams with spans of control ranging from 1 to more than 40.

Leading up to the SaaS Office Hours GTM Edition, every day until then, we are reviewing key insights from the Redpoint GTM survey. Yesterday’s post revealed the most common metric for measuring SDRs and BDRs, and the impact on AE quota attainment. If you’d like to attend the office hours session on these analyses, please register by June 19 here

Today, we’ll review the impact of XDR (either sales development rep or business development rep) attainment on AE quota attainment. This analysis looks at both inside and outside sales AE attainment.

On June 24 at 10am Pacific, SaaS Office Hours will hosting be a virtual session. This time, we will be reviewing some of the insights from Redpoint’s 2020 Go To Market Survey.

Nick Giometti and I have been working to prepare the survey results over many weeks. Last week, we published highlights at Saastock. If you’d like to register to attend and submit questions, please fill out the registration here by June 19.

Written materials transform board meetings. With most of us working remotely, many startups have thrown out Google slides and replaced them with Google docs. It’s a fundamental change, and one I hope persists after work returns to the new normal.

Amazon is famous for its narrative process and contempt of slides. The email in which Bezos banishes decks reads:

“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

Recently, we welcomed Hollie Wegman to SaaS Office Hours to talk about marketing to developers. It was our first virtual event, and we had hundreds of people attend. Given the success of the format, we are going to continue it.

During our chat, Hollie shared some valuable wisdom from her experience as a marketing leader at Segment, Envoy, Mulesoft, and Salesforce. Here are some of the highlights from the session. The full transcript is here

Earlier this week, I wrote Californian Dreaming - Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company, where I analyzed the IPO and M&A trends of venture-backed companies by state. Those metrics are lagging indicators of startup distribution. How will the distribution change with time?

While we can’t know the future M&A and IPO of any company in particular, we can try to divine the future by looking at current unicorn distributions.

So much has happened in the last decade. We’ve seen the rise of massive startups in Europe, South America, China, Israel. Technology entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon. Within the US, there’s much talk of a diaspora out of California and Silicon Valley, particularly with the sudden move to remote work catalyzed by the coronavirus. Has the shine rubbed off the Golden State to reveal pyrite?