SaaSletter - Salesloft/Drift + SaaS Employment Index
SaaSletter - Salesloft/Drift + SaaS Employment Index
Plus content from Insight Partners + Vertice
Salesloft Acquires Drift - The Bigger Picture
The Salesloft / Drift deal (announcement here) provides a good opportunity to highlight some related content:
Summarized: our primary research with G2 across 12 categories with clear platform vs pure play dynamics showed:
For Users: Platforms and pure plays were perfectly equivalent (8.69/10.00) on an aggregate weighted customer satisfaction basis.
For Buyers: ~80% platform preference per the “2023 G2 Software Buyer Behavior Report”
Specific to Salesloft/Drift, this dynamic generally holds for Sales + Martech:
Note: The “Sales #2” category reflects Sales Conversation Intelligence Software, where pure play Gong had far stronger customer satisfaction metrics versus platforms’ conversation intelligence features.
Morgan Stanley’s CIO Survey - with Q4 2023 here - has also consistently shown an impulse to consolidate marketing applications:
Our podcast with Scott Stouffer (Founder + CEO of ScaleMatters, a RevOps optimization platform) also made the case for consolidating the GTM stack, just like this Salesloft/Drift deal:
As always, there are prescient
tweets on any topic:
January 2024 SaaS Employment Index
We’ve updated our SaaS Employment Index through January 2024.
As context, our SaaS Employment Index covers 3,500+ US HQ’ed software companies.
Summarized: the software labor market is healthy + growing below 200 FTEs; later stage is weaker but improving
Insight Partners’ Marketing Benchmarks
Insight Partners released summary marketing benchmarks (n= 500+) from their portfolio. Key themes:
Declining new logo productivity
With an increased reliance on expansion
Need To Improve YOUR Marketing Metrics?
Answer: Add third-party analyst validation of your ROI to your marketing mix with Cloud Ratings True ROI:
Curated Content
ICONIQ Growth covered the environment for IPOs. My excerpt = Past IPOs have performed horribly - for the post-2020 cohort, a strong majority are below-issue price
Vertice’s “SaaS Purchasing and Cloud Spend Insights Q1, 2024” - my full excerpts threaded here with the most notable being the sharp decline in new purchase vs renewal mix:
Battery Ventures’ Condensing the Cloud covered repricing stock options
Investment analyst Matthew Miller published a strong study of “10 bagger” software stocks - an interesting mix of international microcaps alongside Hubspot, Microsoft, ServiceNow types. Rule of 40 efficiency and minimal dilution seem to be the uniting elements.