Sammy is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Blossom Street Ventures. Email him directly at [email protected]What percent of SaaS employees should be in R&D, or sales & marketing, or G&A? It’s a question that was recently posed to us, so we dove into the prospectus’ of 41 large and recognizable SaaS companies to find the data. Observations are below.
R&D and S&M composition. Medians for R&D and S&M were 31% and 39%. 24 of the companies shared their R&D headcount and 15 companies shared their S&M headcount, so these figures will be most representative of a typical SaaS company. G&A was roughly 16% of headcount, as reported by 12 companies. Only 4 shared their customer success numbers and not surprisingly, those companies have huge CS teams given their business model, so it’s not a good sample set from which to derive conclusions on CS headcounts.
Heavy S&M. Likewise, some companies have massive sales and marketing teams. 56% of Snowflake’s headcount is in sales. Docusign comes in at 64%.
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