I saw an interesting LinkedIn post from Tito Bohrt the other day. He wrote:

I think Tito’s intuition is spot on, but I wondered how much and where the slow down is occurring.  So, I ran some numbers.

I started by identifying 14 SaaS companies who:

• Have 150+ total employees
• Have SDRs (or ADRs, BDRs, etc.)
• Promote SDR into AE roles

I ended up with a list of 200 US-based reps who started as SDRs in 2017, 2018, or 2019. 2020 hires won’t yet have the tenure to be captured, so I excluded them from the data. Here’s what I found.

After much delay (and many pings asking when we're launching), today we launch our 2020 Sales Development research.

This is our 8th iteration of this project. This edition is more streamlined than prior years and will take ~5 minutes to complete. If you lead an ADR/BDR/SDR group, please participate. 

We had originally planned to launch this round in April.

And then...Covid.

My original thinking was to punt till 2021. But the volume of inbound emails asking for the timing of our new edition convinced me to reconsider. We have redesigned this year’s survey (ever so slightly) to help determine how things are changing. But, equally importantly, we want to focus in on what outperformance looks like in this environment. 

As always, all answers will be aggregated anonymously. We’ll be sharing the results with you and the rest of the community in the coming months. I appreciate that so many of you take the time to share. We couldn’t do it without you.

Last week, Trish and I did an event with Sam Jacobs of Revenue Collective. We discussed our recent research on sellers' appetites, attitudes, and apprehensions about returning to in-person work.

You can access the full 45-minute recording (which I highly recommend) or . For those of you who want the Reader’s Digest | tl;dr version, we shot a 10-minute Bridge Group Client Brief hitting highlights.

LinkedIn has been hard lately.

I’m sure you are seeing the same thing - post after post from friends and colleagues about layoffs. While the impact has been enormous in people terms, the scale has been hard to gauge. Are we over the hump? Is the snowball still rolling downhill? 

So I decided to do some research. I built a list of 200 B2B SaaS companies that:

• Had 100+ employees
• Took venture funding since 2018
  and
• Are HQ’d in the US or Canada
   

I then used the amazing crowdsourced resources of layoff.fyi’s tracker and Candor’s hiring/freezing/layoff data to track which companies are still hiring, which have frozen hiring, or which have done layoffs. Here’s what I found.
 

Point 1: Funded B2B SaaS was hit hard

From our broader B2B tech data, we know that roughly 30% of companies laid off AEs through late April. For my VC-backed SaaS sample, that number is 41% with another 18% having frozen hiring.

Those selling into Massively Affected Industries (MAI) were the hardest hit. We define MAI as advertising, hospitality, HR & recruiting, live events, medical practices, real estate, travel, and so on.