A Market Map Example: A Real CFO Search, Sourced End to End
Mathijs Bronsdijk7 min readUpdated August 19, 2026
On this page
- Salary
- Other compensation
- Stock and option awards
Both figures are from the companies' own DEF 14A proxy statements filed with the SEC. Salary includes base only; equity is the reported value of stock and option awards.
Someone searching “market map example” wants to see the thing, not a description of the thing. Our guide to the method explains how to build one; this page shows what it actually produces, worked through on a hypothetical mandate with real numbers.
The scenario: a growth-stage B2B SaaS company, venture-backed, somewhere past $50M in annual revenue, needs to hire its first public-company-ready CFO ahead of a planned raise. No real client sits behind this. Every company, wage, and compensation figure below is real and sourced; the mandate itself is illustrative, built to show the method end to end without touching client work.
What does the scope look like in a real market map?
Before a single candidate gets named, the market gets scoped in three rings, each with a stated reason a company belongs there. This is the research stage of the executive search process, the part a client is usually asked to take on trust:
| Ring | Who’s in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Core | CFOs and VP Finance leaders at venture-backed or recently-public B2B SaaS companies, $50-500M ARR | Same buyer motion, same board dynamics, same “get audit-ready” problem this search exists to solve |
| Adjacent | Finance leaders at vertical SaaS, fintech, or usage-based-billing companies outside pure horizontal SaaS | Transferable skill set (recurring revenue, investor reporting) from a company most competitors won’t think to check |
| Edge | Controllers or Assistant Treasurers one level down at larger public SaaS companies | A stretch case: real public-company exposure, first-time-CFO upside, only worth including if the core ring runs thin |
Writing the reason down is the point. When a client asks why a company isn’t on the list, or why one is, the answer is already on the page instead of invented on the call.
See your own market scoped this way, rings and reasons included.
Start your free monthHow deep is the candidate pool, really?
Before profiling anyone, size the pool from the top down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program counted 841,710 people employed nationally as financial managers (SOC 11-3031) in its May 2025 estimates, the occupational category that covers controllers, treasurers, and CFOs across every industry and company size.
That number is a ceiling, not an answer. It says nothing about how many of those people run finance at a venture-backed SaaS company specifically, which is exactly why the scope rings above exist: they’re what narrows an occupational category of 841,710 down to the few hundred people who actually fit this mandate. BLS prices the profession; the rings price the search.
What does a sourced comp benchmark actually look like?
This is where a market map earns its keep, and where most competitor content stops at a guess. Two sources do the work, and they answer different questions.
BLS OEWS prices the occupation nationally. For financial managers, May 2025:
| Measure | National figure |
|---|---|
| Median annual wage | $166,570 |
| Mean annual wage | $186,910 |
| National employment | 841,710 |
That’s a floor. It won’t price a specific public-company CFO seat, because it averages in every financial manager at every company size, from a 20-person firm to a Fortune 100.
SEC proxy statements price the actual seat. Every public company discloses what it pays its named executive officers, including the CFO, in its DEF 14A proxy statement. Here’s what that looks like for two real, similarly-staged public SaaS companies, pulled directly from their most recent filings:
| Company | Fiscal year | CFO | Salary | Non-equity incentive | Equity awards | All other comp | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot, Inc. (NYSE: HUBS) | FY2025 | Kate Bueker | $538,333 | $430,122 | $8,403,814 | $5,000 | $9,377,269 |
| PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE: PD) | FY2026 (ended Jan 31, 2026) | Howard Wilson | $471,814 | $205,139 | $4,570,615 | $58,445 | $5,306,013 |
Both figures come straight from each company’s own Summary Compensation Table: HubSpot’s 2026 proxy statement and PagerDuty’s 2026 proxy statement. Nothing here is estimated. Add each row and it foots exactly to the total the company itself reported.
What does the gap between them actually tell you?
The two CFOs’ base salaries sit within 15% of each other, $538,333 and $471,814. Their total compensation differs by 77%. That gap is almost entirely equity: HubSpot’s CFO received $8.4M in stock awards against PagerDuty’s $4.6M in option awards, and that’s the real signal.
This is what a sourced comp benchmark is actually for. It doesn’t hand the client one number to quote in an offer letter, it shows where the number comes from, so a client can reason about which comparable is closer to their own stage.
A pre-IPO company sizing an offer against HubSpot’s CFO comp would badly overshoot; sizing against PagerDuty’s, or scaling down from it based on the company’s own equity pool, gets closer to a real number. Neither company is “the market rate.” Both, together with the BLS floor, are the range, and the client sees the whole range instead of a single confident-sounding guess.
Get a comp read built from filings you can open yourself, not a survey vendor's black box.
Start your free monthHow does a real map label a candidate profile?
The same discipline extends to individual candidates once the pool gets named. Three tiers, and a real map never blurs them:
Fact
Sourced and current. “VP Finance at a Series D vertical SaaS company since 2023” is a fact if it’s confirmed on the company’s own site or a filing.
Estimate
A modeled or ranged value you can defend but not point-source. “Likely total comp in the $600-900K range” for a private company’s finance lead, built from the BLS floor plus the equity-scaling pattern in the table above, is an estimate.
Inference
A reasonable read that isn’t confirmed. “Plausibly open to a move given a recent funding round stall at their current company” is an inference: worth noting, never worth stating as settled.
A composite, illustrative example (not a real candidate): “VP Finance, $150-300M ARR vertical SaaS company [fact, per company site]. Estimated total comp $550-750K based on the BLS floor and comparable-stage equity awards [estimate]. Possibly reachable given the company’s recent down round [inference, unconfirmed].” Three sentences, three confidence levels, and a client who reads it knows exactly which one to verify before making a call.
The through-line
Every number on this page traces to a source you can click: BLS for the occupational floor, two companies’ own SEC filings for the seat itself.
That’s the entire method, the same one behind every market map we build: scope in rings with reasons stated, size from a real source, benchmark against filings instead of a survey vendor’s paywall, and label every candidate claim by how confident it actually is.
This page is one full module in practice. See what’s in every module of a real Market Map for the full deliverable this sits inside.
It’s also why running part of this through AI doesn’t change the discipline, it just changes who does the fetching. A model can pull a filing and total a table fast; it still can’t be the source, and a map that can’t point to one number’s origin is worth exactly as much as a guess.
See how to win an executive search mandate for how a sourced map like this one changes a pitch, or talent mapping for executive search for what comes after the market is scoped: naming the actual people inside it, with the same sourcing discipline.
See a real market map built for your next search, sourced like this one.
Start your free monthSources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Financial Managers (SOC 11-3031), May 2025 national estimates.
- HubSpot, Inc., DEF 14A proxy statement, filed April 27, 2026 (FY2025 Summary Compensation Table).
- PagerDuty, Inc., DEF 14A proxy statement, filed May 4, 2026 (FY2026 Summary Compensation Table).
Frequently asked questions
What does a market map example actually look like?
Three parts. A scoped list of companies organized in rings from core to edge, a sized candidate pool with a stated source for the size, and a comp benchmark built from public filings and government wage data rather than a guess. This page walks through all three for a hypothetical CFO search.
Where do the numbers in a market map come from?
Two kinds of public source. Government wage data, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, prices the occupation broadly and sets a floor. Named-executive proxy statements filed with the SEC (DEF 14A) price the actual seat at a specific company, because public companies are legally required to disclose what they pay their CFO, CEO, and other named executives.
Why do two similar executive comp figures differ so much?
Mostly equity, not salary. In this example, the two CFOs' base salaries are within 15% of each other, but their total compensation differs by 77%, almost entirely from the size of their stock and option awards. Comp scales with the size and stage of the company, not with the title alone.
Do I need paid data to build a market map like this?
No. Every figure in this example comes from a free, public source, SEC EDGAR for company filings and proxy statements, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for wage data. The constraint isn't access, it's the discipline of citing every figure and labeling anything that isn't a hard fact.