Account executives and sales development teams are the front lines of a SaaS startup’s go-to-market team. They perfect the craft of matching the right product and the right customer, growing the company’s revenues. For most SaaS companies, these teams see the highest turnover. But how much turnover is typical?

Vik Singh and the team at Infer, which is a Redpoint company, set out to answer this question. They used publicly available data to track account executives (AEs) and sales development representatives (SDRs) across 41 high profile SaaS companies. These 41 companies include public companies and unicorns.

The chart above shows the distribution which ranges from 0.2% to 12.8% annually. The median AE count is 103 across this population.

So what level of attrition is typical? Annual attrition quartiles below tell the story. Most large scale teams see between 2 to 7% annually.

How about lifetime churn?

Here the data disperses more. The median is 40% annual churn, the top quartile is 21%, and the bottom quartile is 57%. This data point is a bit noiser because not all companies have been in business for the same amount of time.

How does this apply to earlier stage companies? They provide directional guidance for smaller teams. The smaller the team the greater the variance. A team of 10 AEs/SDRs that turns 3 over has a 33% annual rate, but that may not be alarming.

The next step of the analysis is more important than the turn over metric. Why did people leave? Is the transition regretted (we wished this person stayed) or not-regretted (it wasn’t a good mutual fit).

Tracking the evolution of that data is critical as the company scales to ensure the front lines of the GTM team are healthy. If your team varies meaningfully from these benchmarks, the right next step is to investigate why.