Worked there from 2007-2010, through the sale etc. I had no idea they were up to 750 employees, and can't guess why they've gotten so big. There were 10-15 employees, 2 engineers in 2008 and that company was printing its own money, lots of it. I'm sure revenue is much higher today, but that profit amount isn't a big jump from where the company was headed pre-buyout, on momentum alone. Really have to wonder what they are spending it all on (besides payroll tax).
How sure how closely it compares to large companies, but with most of the [large] companies i've been at, the metric for promotion was how many people you could hire under you. Not code quality, size of system, not impact, not money saved, not business enabled....just the size of your org chart. Not sure why HR devolves into such a silly metric for non-revenue generating departments, but i've seen it at 5 separate organizations. Is it any wonder employees then behave in the ways they do and build empires?
If you read Parkinsons Law you will discover the Law Of Multiplication of Subordinates. This is the little known law compared to the one about work filling the time, etc.
He shows that between 1914 and 1928 the number of ships in the Royal Navy went down 67% but the number of Admiralty officials (aka management) went up 78%.
He was the Scott Adams of that time. (Google the article which originally appeared in The Economist in November 1955)
Judging from the article, the cuts were mostly in B2B sales. I could definitely see sales bloating up a SaaS company's headcount very fast. (That's something I'm having to watch out for in my current company.)
Right, which is why you let them go if they don't hit quota. What they do is the most measurable part of the acquisition funnel. Laying off a large group of them speaks to financial issues/improper planning vs. just regular weeding out if poor performers.
Quotas are fine for an enterprise with a decades old sales process that has data to measure. SurveyMonkey was entering a new market and growing the sales force quickly and before they even knew what a reasonable quota was.
You could say that's bad planning, you could also say it's throwing spaghetti at the wall to see which sales person sticks. Data gathering, if you will.
That doesn't work when you're setting targets for very aggressive growth. A much higher % of salespeople won't hit their quotas, and not because of bad performance, but usually because of bad (aggressive) planning.
Letting those many people go would mean spending too much money on replacements, that probably still won't sell their quotas.
in the essence, you market analysis (value generated to customer, willingness to pay, potential market size is wrong.
As you said, this looks like a business model failure, not a sales failure.
If they layoffs are largely sales, I'll bet the cost of acquisition was getting out of control. I've found in practice it certainly can be hard to keep an eye on LTV (the long game), since sales teams live and die for month-over-month results. To support a people-heavy sales process, you need to have decent headroom in your margins, and they might not have had a lot of success getting people from the $25 to the $85 price point.
It’s not so simple when you sell a product with recurring revenue. When you sell something like a computer, you get a chunk of revenue right away, you make margin on that, and you pay your salesperson out of the margin. You can work out quotas based on the salesperson’s base salary and overheads. That’s a very simple model, and nearly everybody understands it well enough to know when a salesperson is profitable and when they’re not.
But when a product has recurring revenue, like seat licenses, you have to model the revenue and mach it up to the compensation. You could tell the salesperson that they get commission when you get revenue, in which case an enterprise sale will pay very little today, put provide an annuity over a long period of time.
But salespeople hate that. The thing they control, the sale, happens immediately, but the things they don’t control, like whether you lay them off, whether the customer decides to switch providers, &c. happen over time and are much more likely to cut their income than to boost it.
You generally have to be a very mature company with a very well-understood business model to structure salesperson’s income over the long term.
Most growth companies are fraught with risks. Thus, salespeople want a chunk of their money when they make the sale. And thus, you have to model the net present value of the sale and structure the salesperson’s compensation accordingly.
Now you are taking on some of that risk. And the faster you want to grow, the more salespeople you need to hire, and the more of that risk you need to shoulder. Basically, you’re buying future revenue with cash right now. If the revenue doesn’t materialize, you’re out of pocket,and you need to have fewer salespeople.
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p.s. I’m leaving out the REAL reason why many growth companies lay salespeople off when growth stalls. I explained it above in terms of the value of a sale from a revenue basis. But for most growth companies, the value of a sale is in how it boosts the perception that the company is in hyper-groth mode, which leads to higher valuations, which leads to founders and investors making mad crazy bank.
Under such circumstances, the cost of sales can exceed the net present value of the expected revenue from the sale, but companies will merrily dump investment funds into the sales force to keep the company growing at a rate that justifies more investment funds, and maybe get a round where they can take money off the table or go public and make the investors rich.
If the company is “buying growth” with its sales force, and growth stalls, you have to get rid of sales very quickly, because even when they’re making sales, they aren’t paying for themselves. And when they aren’t making sales, they’re dragging the company deep into the hole.
The interesting thing about this scenario (“buying growth,” as opposed to “buying revenue” described above) is how it affects employees whose equity is locked into the long term. Generally, they shoulder all the risk of this tactic not working, while investors reap all the rewards when it works and they take money out early.
This was a very thorough and helpful explanation. I'm intimately familiar with the marketing side of the equation in SaaS businesses, investing in future revenue, etc., but less so on the sales side. Based on this explanation it actually seems like there are quite a lot of similarities.
The original question I had was more around the poor performance vs. poor planning aspect, but it looks like there's another variation on option two which is "intentional (if perhaps overly optimistic) planning."
I'm curious for more of the salesperson's perspective on this. Do most sales people and sales managers accepting these roles have much sense of their targets being overly aggressive? How do those hiring conversations typically go around quota and what is realistic?
I was using SM in 2008 and it was fantastic. Ironically I use SM in the same exact way today as I did in 2008... except apparently 700 more employees on the other end.
I'm honestly kind of surprised SurveyMonkey had over 100 employees to begin with. I always thought of SurveyMonkey as a more fully featured version of something like http://strawpoll.me/ with more analytical features and such. I never would have expected them to be a company of nearly 1000 employees.
Not calling it "SurveyMonkey" would be a good start for a business product.
For me, and when I try to put myself in others' shoes, I find it hard to see how a professional organisation linking to "SurveyMonkey" can do anything but create a negative impression. The product seems good, I'm just surprised the name has lasted this long.
Does the name stick because the brand recognition is stronger than the features -- when compared to competitors? What happens when a name like this has "stuck"?
I'd like to see conversion rates between qualtrics and surveymonkey surveys. Who is the monkey, exactly? The person building the survey, the person filling it out, or the company providing the service?
What about the name is so negative for you? Do you feel the same about other companies like MailChimp?
In Australia the name is synonymous with online surveys - it wasn't until I moved to the US that I realized that some people think it's such a strange name.
Where I come from the word "monkey" is used to describe an incompetent or fool. I doubt anyone would see a racist connotation here, but it has been used in that context too.
I don't know what MailChimp is but I'm already not taking a company with that name seriously! And definitely not having that name visible to my own clients or customers.
Founded in 1999, SurveyMonkey is valued at $2 billion
Given the stated revenue of $200M and the recent atmosphere around SaaS multiples, is a 10x valuation realistic here? (I'm not throwing shade - genuine semi-naïve question.)
It's high for even for a b2b saas company. I think another consideration that should probably bring SurveyMonkey's down is that they have great competitors.
I'm starting a surveymonkey competitor to get a piece of the action, if anyone wants to join forces and reap the rewards, please reply and I will contact you.
SurveyGizmo is another. Have used them for several years. My general perception over the years has been that SurveyMonkey had shinier marketing, but SurveyGizmo had a solid feature set.
For true enterprise scale, Medallia, MaritzCX, and Confirmit. For business-oriented surveying and analysis, Qualtrics is in my opinion by far the best.
Confirmit is the market leader in this space. I've evaluated the offerings of Survey Monkey enterprise and the features are not yet on par with their competitors.
Recently signed a deal for 210,000 square feet of office space, 4x the size of their University Ave space just a year after they moved in with a $6.6 mil/year lease.
"The cuts amount to about 13 percent of SurveyMonkey’s workforce of about 750. The cuts were made primarily among the sales team devoted to SurveyMonkey for Business."
Actually not too surprised. The customer service of SurveyMonkey (and Fluid Survey that they acquired recently) is of D grade now. Getting some rudimentary information about service and internals took years. Now we are looking for other tools as my work publishes few surveys everyday. Their product has not changed in years and seems likes company is confused about the future direction.
The thing I find surprising is that they have that many staff and yet the surveys themselves are still so ugly - the visual design has really changed since about 2002 from what I can see
Google Ventures (early stage) and Google Capital (late stage) are focused solely on profit, rather than strategic alignment with Google. Google's Corporate Development group is what does investments for alignment and potential acquisition by Google.
When you're working with business clients who are not technical, a lot of support can come in, even if it's just to help onboarding. In a lot of B2B SAAS, the long term value of each customer means it's totally worth having support staff spend a day helping out.
Here it seems like they were trying the B2B SAAS route, and they decided against it, so are firing basically the team on that.
