Metrics
A guy walks into a bar and orders a $17 Martini. Is it MRR (monthly recurring revenue)? The potentially surprising answer: maybe, and often yes. * If he's a tourist who happened to walk in, then no, it's not MRR. * If he's lived here for
Marketing
Just a quick post to share the slides for the presention I gave today at SaaS Metrics Palooza, entitled You Can't Fix a CAC Payback Period: The Operator vs. Investor View of SaaS Metrics. (For those with Slideshare issues, Google Drive share is here.) The presentation discusses: * The
Churn
The other day I was looking at an ARR bridge [1] with a young finance ace. He made a few comments and concluded with, “and net revenue retention (NRR) is thus 112%, not bad.” I thought, “Wait, stop! You can’t calculate NRR from an ARR bridge [2].” It’s
Growth
Question: what do you call a 10-year old startup with $10M in ARR? Answer: a small business [1]. When you make a list of key SaaS metrics, you'll rarely find age listed among them. That's correct in the sense that age by itself tells you
Metrics
It was a combination of luck and foresight that I started talking with Allan Wille and Lauren Thibodeau about capital efficiency as a potential topic for their Metric Stack podcast many months ago. Because now, as the episode is coming out, capital efficiency is the hot topic of the day.
Marketing
When asked, “how is it going?” many companies will respond with something akin to, “things are looking strong, the pipeline is up to $50M.” Not a bad statement, but certainly an imprecise one. “Over what timeframe?” you might ask. To which you’ll typically hear one of two answers * “Uh,
Customer Success
Earlier this week I appeared on a webinar with You Mon Tsang, founder and CEO of ChurnZero, a SaaS application aimed at helping subscription businesses reduce churn. In this post, I will share the video of event, provide a link to the slides, provide a link to the Q&
Marketing
Question: how much does a $15M SaaS company spend on sales and marketing as a percent of ARR? Answer: 35% (with 45% and 15% as the top and bottom quartiles). Charts like this, from OpenView's 2021 Financial & Operating Benchmarks survey, help to answer questions like that all
Marketing
Quiz: Your marketing team generates an MQL. It's passed to an SDR, who does basic BANT-style qualification and decides it's real. They create a sales opportunity in your pipeline and pass it to a seller. What number is in the opportunity's value field
Metrics
I'm revising this post because I learned today that I've been named not once (as I thought yesterday) but twice to the SaaStr All-Time Top 25 List of podcast episodes (see Top 1-12 and Top 13-25). Apologies for the confusion, but wow, what
Management
Say you're a $40M SaaS business growing at 40%. Is that good? Is that bad? How do you know? In this post, we'll take a quick look at three lenses you should look through in considering this question. * The plan lens * The benchmark lens * The market
CEO
"Data, data everywhere. Nor any drop to drink." -- adapted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge [2] In a world where many executives are overwhelmed with sales and marketing metrics -- from MQL generation to pipeline analysis to close-rates and everything in between -- I am writing this post in the spirit