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.

What a year April 2020 was.

Record breaking unemployment news, record setting fiscal and monetary reaction, positive (?), and ever-changing epidemiological models make it hard to trust the ground underfoot.

We wanted to quantify the evolving impact on the B2B tech space so together with RevOps Squared, we surveyed 110+ revenue leaders. We asked:

• What actions they have already taken
• Future actions they are considering
  and
• Their outlook for the remainder of calendar 2020
   

Finding 1: Roughly 30% of leaders report reducing the number of AEs

(Note this data is as of April 24^th) The median reduction was 40% - a huge number! A further 35% report concern over possible future reductions.