What is a good sales target for a sales person in SaaS in India?

Unfortunately there is no fixed answer. Problem with SaaS is that there are too many moving variables. LTV,Churn,ARR,ARPU etc. So its really hard to come up with one fixed number. So based on our experience and our product the following is a number we have come up with to set targets for our sales organization.

0.8x(x is the sales person’s salary)

So, a sales person should pull in 0.8x worth of MRR every month. Or 9.6x worth of annual contract values every month. This is the number from which they start getting incentives.So for example a sales rep getting around 18 lakhs salary should pull in around Rs.1,20,000 MRR every month. If he pulls in 30,000 MRR(0.2X) he will be just covering his base salary. If he pulls in 75,000(0.5X) he will be covering the organization costs. And only if he pulls in anything above that will the company move towards profitability. And only when the company is profitable will the sales get an incentive.

Obviously there are a lot of assumptions made to arrive at this number. We are assuming the LTV to be around a year and churn is also very low. You can find a spreadsheet with some numbers here. You can modify the variables to fit for your organization.Just open SaaS Sales Targets and play around with the values to see the numbers. You can also download it and modify it as you see fit.

Since we started a sales organization a couple of years ago we have been experimenting with different variables and this is a good rule of thumb to follow for setting sales targets. Please comment on what your experience has been. Is our model too tough on sales guys or too easy. Hopefully we can all come out with a comprehensive model for sales in SaaS in India.

A conference of the products, for the products and by the product leaders

Indian startup space is on a roll and while there is a lot of money being invested, we strongly believe that one needs a lot more talks on products – ranging from product management to marketing / growth hacking et al.

Product Nation has partnered with NextBigWhat for its upcoming conference, ProductGeeksConfAt ProductGeeksConf, you will hear various product leaders share insights/experiences building some of the great products from India.

Some of the speakers include:

Punit Soni (Flipkart CPO), Deepak Abott (Marketing Tech specialist) and several others (more speakers will be announced by this week).

Topics include:

  1. Scaling up Product Management Function
  2.  How Social Media influences Product Management decisions
  3. The emergence of the growth hacker and how this new role and how growth teams
  4. Marketing tech hacks for app developers on budget.
  5. The Nuances of Customer Acquisition  : CAC,LTV,ARPU,MRR. WTF

As far as industry focus is concerned, the conference has something for everyone – be it consumer, enterprise or the app developers.

We are happy to announce that ProductNation community gets a special discount of 20% on the conference tickets (registration link / use the code PRODUCTNATION).

Date : June 19th
Venue: MLR Convention Center, Bangalore.
URL: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/unpluggd/productgeeksconf/

Note that the discount is valid only till June 8th.