2024 B2B SaaS Sales Benchmarks- with Sally Duby, Chief Sales Officer - The Bridge Group

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Sally Duby, the Chief Sales Officer at The Bridge Group. We'll be covering four primary topics from The Bridge Group's 2024 SaaS Account Executive benchmark report, including the account executive compensation trends on target earnings, base salary and commissions, account executive quota trends, looking at it by average contract value, the account executive quota achievement trends in 2023, win rate trends and even a little bit of insight into the evolving nature of expansion and renewal responsibilities. Sally, could you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Sally Duby** (1:26)
Thanks a lot, Ray. I really appreciate being on here. I've been in tech sales for many years.
I would guess, I would say I got my true official start back selling at Oracle when Oracle was a $50 million company. And I was there for years and went into various management roles. And when I left, it was a billion dollar company. Really, I think was on the very early stages of some rocket ships in technology sales. That, you know, I went and built some sales teams, optimized some sales teams, and I've been in consulting now with The Bridge Group for the last eight years, nine years.
And one of the great things about The Bridge Group is that every year we do a survey to benchmark either SaaS AEs or sales development. And so every other year we release one of those. And this year, early this year, we released our SaaS AE report, and some really interesting things came out of it. I don't know if any of them were real surprising or just confirmed a lot of what those of us that are feet on the street selling knew about what was happening over the last year, year and a half.

**Ray Rike** (2:49)
Well, there were some surprising things to me in there, and we'll go over those today.
A lot of people don't know, like Oracle, they were one of the founding fathers of outbound sales development, telebusiness outreach. When people said you couldn't sell enterprise software solutions, and you were part of that on the ground floor. And like me, you've lived through the 01.com bus, the 809 kind of global recession, and then a little bit of decreased bubble we had in 2016 Before we get into the report, I did have one question. Did this one, did this, what I call, Investmore Venture Board just calls it a sassacre of 2022 and 2023 Did it feel any different to you than the other two?

**Sally Duby** (3:32)
Yes, this definitely felt different to me. And being through all of those downturns that you mentioned, starting back at the 0.com bus in 2000, 2001, this felt different. It felt more desperate, if you will.
And it hit harder for many organizations than what I've seen in the past.

**Ray Rike** (3:58)
I agree. I was telling my wife, I compare it to going from being a 12 year old to a adolescent and we're encountering all these new things. And because I truly believe the sass industry has entered the next phase of evolution and things are just different. We're not going to be that seven year old kid anymore.
But I've been a reader of the Bridge Group reports since 2007 I used them to help set my own operating plans when I was running revenue teams.
So can you tell us a little bit about this year's report? And then we're going to get right into the first thing, which is all about compensation.

**Sally Duby** (4:36)
So this year, we had once we scrubbed data, which we do scrub data, by the way, when we get in the surveys, because there's some funky stuff that we see that, you know, just doesn't make sense. So we eliminate all of that. And we ended up with 172 people that took the survey. Most of them, the great majority, are headquartered in North America.
And we had a company size, about a 24 million was the median in annual revenues.
And the median average contract value, ARR, per deal was about 47,000. But we had a range of a ton of under $5 million companies to about 8% of the respondents were over the 500 million mark. We did have a good range.