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Metrics that Measure Up

Author: Ray Rike

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B2B SaaS and Cloud founders, CEOs, and Go-To-Market operating executives share their journey as they scaled their business from $0M ARR to $100M and beyond. The guests share their insights on measurements of success, performance metrics, and benchmarks they use to guide and inform their decision-making and growth journey.Guests include founders and CEOs of amazing success stories such as LinkedIn, DocuSign, Marketo, Gainsight, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, ringDNA, InsightSquared, Cloudera and Gong. Beyond founders and CEOs, we also speak with leading Venture Capitalists, Go-To-Market executives and industry thought leaders who share their experience and insights into customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer expansion best practices.

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Jamie Davidson is a two-time Chief Technology and after his stint as a first Chief Customer Officer decided that Customer Success technology needed a next-generation platform with over 500 customers and funding by A16Z. As a result, Vitally.io was born!Impact of Catalyst and Totango on the Customer Success Technology IndustryThe Future of Customer SuccessThe Evolution of Customer Success MetricsThe Challenges of a Founder in Customer Success TechnologyRecently, two leading players in the Customer Success Platform category, Totango and Catalyst announced their plans to merge. Jamie's perspective is that it could be problematic for category momentum in the short term, but was simply a business decision by two companies that were in no way indicative of the Customer Success platform category as a whole or the Customer Success procession.How is Customer Success going to evolve over the next few years? Jamie sees Customer Success becoming more strategic, especially with the help of additional data, insights, and AI. Ultimately, a balance of the existing role as the primary customer relationship manager, while becoming more strategic as the "voice of the customer" to better inform product roadmap, marketing messaging, and new customer sales.Customer Success, coupled with better tooling has the potential to materially increase the strategic impact that Customer Success delivers. The evolution of Customer Success technology will move beyond the goal of serving the Customer Success leader and will surface insights and data important to other executive leaders beyond the CS leader, including the other GTM leaders and product leaders.If you are leading a Customer Success team, making budget allocation decisions for Customer Success, or are just interested in understanding and helping to determine the future of Customer Success in your company, this conversation with Jamie is a very helpful listen!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Craig Walker, Founder and CEO of Dialpad has trained their artificial intelligence foundational model using over 6 Billion minutes of customer conversations. If you are interested in how AI is currently and will positively impact the value, efficiency, and effectiveness of customer communications for Sales, Customer Service, and beyond this is a must-listen episode of the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast.During this episode, we cover a wide-ranging set of topics on how AI (Artificial Intelligence) and specifically generative AI will transform the productivity and business impact of customer communications including:The importance of large amounts of data in training AI modelsThe future of Customer Service in an AI-empowered environmentThe potential to materially increase the productivity of a sales process with AIWhat is the difference between "customer intelligence" and "conversational intelligence"? First, customer intelligence is built into the foundation of a company's communications infrastructure - think phone system platform. Because of this, in real time a customer intelligence platform can guide customer service and/or sales reps in real-time to increase the efficacy of every customer interaction. Moreover, any external communication can now be enhanced across every function and every conversation.Artificial Intelligence is not new, but generative AI is new with the catalyst of OpenAI and ChatGPT in November 2022. Dialpad has been capturing customer conversations to score performance measurements like customer satisfaction and analyze if the customer was satisfied - all before the emergence of generative AI. Once generative emerged, Dialpad unleased their 15 Data Science PhDs to build their own large language model to better understand every customer conversation and in real-time offer up the appropriate response or next step action!Now, think about the opportunities uncovered by taking every minute of your company's customer and prospect communications, and customize the large language model specific to your company, your company terms, product names and every other unique "variable" specific to your business?!If you are responsible for customer-facing functions and are interested in better understanding how AI can dramatically increase the efficacy of every customer and/or prospect communication, this conversation with Craig Walker, founder and CEO of Dialpad is full of unique insights, ideas, and recommendations that have been formed from over 6 Billion minutes of customer communications.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Ecosystem-Led Growth is an evolution of Partner-Led Growth and is the vision of Bob Moore, Founder and CEO of Crossbeam and the author of Ecosystem-Led Growth.Bob started his tech career as an investor at Insight Partners, and then founded RJ Metrics which was acquired by Magento in 2016, now part of Adobe, and then Bob co-founded Stitch Data which was ultimately acquired by Talend and is now part of Click.Crossbeam was founded to unlock the modern platform's architecture and data layer enabling companies to collaborate by making it much easier to share data across multiple partner companies. The catalyst to Bob founding Crossbeam was a $2.6B mistake! That mistake was one Bob made at RJ Metrics where they found and then fell out of product-market fit as evidenced by lower growth. When they analyzed the factor leading to the reduced growth, they identified the emergence of the API economy and how buyers wanted to be able to buy point solutions that were easy to integrate with other point solutions - which was the inspiration to build a product that fully leverages the modern data stack and open API ecosystem.What is Ecosystem-Led Growth? It is the ability to leverage a network of partners who can easily share insights with partners who sell complimentary products to the same target buyers. Simple questions like do we have customers or prospects in common, or do you have an active sales cycle going on that we could partner on to build a joint solution for the customer?What is the difference between building an "app ecosystem" such as the Salesforce App Exchange and a "partner ecosystem"? It starts with a foundation built upon an open system architecture that enables the sharing of data to collaborate on common target customers, and those companies in the ecosystem are willing to share specific data with partners to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.Why are most B2B SaaS companies still using a traditional direct sales model versus focusing more on partner ecosystems as a primary lead source? The answer starts with the negative reputation of how partnership models were implemented, managed, and operated historically. Partnerships were viewed as encroaching on sales rep opportunities and having a partner damage the reputation of their partners by not adequately communicating the value, feature, and function of their partner's solution.Modern Ecosystem-Led growth does not rely upon an army of partnership reps, it leverages the data that already exists in each partnership infrastructure, such as their CRM system. Now, based upon corporate policy, rules, and intercompany workflows, an existing partner can share the relevant data with their partner(s) which will enable that sales rep to have access to data that will make approaching a new potential customer armed with relevant data regarding the tech stack and preferences of a potential customer.If you are looking for new ways to increase revenue growth efficiency, decrease customer acquisition costs, and identify "best fit" potential customers by participating in an ecosystem with partners who share those goals and understand the concept of "give to get" this episode is chalked full of ideas, insights and applicable steps to leverage the emerging growth strategy of Ecosystem-Led Growth!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Mark Petruzzi, best-selling author of Selling the Cloud has just released his newest book "Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling" in collaboration with co-authors Bob Scarperi, Paul Melchiorre, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast!In this episode, we discuss the primary concepts of the book, and the unique approach to including multiple titans in the B2B technology industry as contributors to the bookThe "Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling" book covers each stage of the Sales process and how following the process dramatically increases sales productivity and revenue growth efficiency. The process steps and associated chapters discussed include:Ideal Customer Profile - which accounts will buyBuyer Personas - which decision-makers can buyBusiness Diagnosis - uncovering the valueFunctional Diagnosis - understanding the winsSolution Design - validating the valueData-Driven Funnel Analytics - the end-to-end viewHow to Measure a Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling ProcessThe Predictive and Generative AI power moveIf you are a B2B sales professional, sales team leader, or a senior executive looking for ideas to generate more efficient revenue growth - this conversation and the "Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling" process and book provide great insights, success stories, and applicable steps to take.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Hayden Stafford is the President and Chief Revenue Officer of Seismic, a leading Sales Enablement Platform. He recently dropped by the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast studio to discuss the state of B2B Sales.We covered a wide-ranging list of topics and insights including:The State of B2B SalesAccelerating Growth in an “efficient capital” environmentGrowth is more than metrics…but metrics matter tooSales Process vs Customer Journey - how do they co-existFirst, Hayden shared how he has seen B2B Sales evolve over the past 12-18 months. Though the fundamentals of B2B Sales success have not changed, they have become more important. With reduced win rates, longer sales cycles, and more people in the buying process it requires B2B Sales organizations to become more effective and efficient. How to make B2B Sales professionals more effective - a recent McKinsey survey said better preparing sales professionals with better enablement and enhanced sales intelligence.Many buyers are looking to "consolidate" their SaaS investments, including RevTech into fewer vendors. A key to helping B2B SaaS salespeople be more efficient, one corporate strategy is to expand the product portfolio to become a "platform" versus a "point solution".Common measurements to justify Revenue Technology investments include:Go-to-Market EfficiencyBuyer ExperienceOperational OptimizationTime to Market / Agility to Market ChangesIf you are directly responsible for a B2B Sales team or have a B2B Sales team that is primarily responsible for your customer acquisition and/or expansion performance, this conversation is full of great ideas and insights!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Speaking to Jacco van der Kooij, Founder and CEO, Winning by Design is like drinking a shot of espresso first thing in the morning.During this episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast, our host Ray Rike covers a wide array of topics that essentially asks the question - "Has SaaS lost Go-to-Market Fit?" and if so "What to do about it". Topics covered include:Data that highlights the need to change Go-to-Market tactics in SaaSThe concept and reality of the need to "Cut to Grow"The importance of Unit EconomicsGo-to-Market Fit - What is it?ScaleUp Fit - when is the right timeGTM Efficiency Metrics that Matter more in 2024 and beyondIf you are responsible for the Go-to-Market functions in a B2B SaaS company, or as the CEO and CFO depend on the GTM functions to delivery efficient revenue growth, this conversation is a great listen!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Customer Subscription financing is an innovative way to increase cash reserves in a non equity dilutive manner and not incurring the high interest rates associated with revenue credit facilities. Alex Sandkuhl, Founder and CEO of Keystone Growth provides several examples of company use cases and the benefits of the customer subscription financing model.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Kelly Hopping recently assumed the role of Chief Marketing Officer at Demandbase discusses a wide variety of topics that are critical to the modern B2B SaaS CMO in this wide-ranging, fast-moving discussion:Marketing Focus on Pipeline GenerationAccount Based + Intent data = Efficient GrowthTop CMO Metrics in 2024Thriving in a corporate career while staying true to yourselfEvery single dollar matters in the new reality for B2B SaaS companies, how does this impact B2B Marketing? Focus is the number one strategy in 2024 and beyond, which means ensuring you have a very targeted Ideal Customer Profile, which demands focus on the highest intent potential customers. Using intent data is one tactic to be deployed to increase the ROI on marketing investments. Specifically, less than 5% of the total ICP is in market for your product at any given point in time, so being able to read and act upon the most predictive intent data signals is a core competency for the modern B2B marketing organization.Next, we discussed how to best prioritize even inbound, hand raisers who come to a company's website. Understanding how the inbound lead has interacted with other digital assets, and confirming they are a good fit into the target ICP based upon firmographic and even technographic data. Another key capability for the most efficient revenue growth is ensuring that the right leads get into the right hands as quickly as possible.Kelly highlighted that having the "right people" in place is a precursor to having the right processes and technology in place. Another key requirement is to ensure Marketing and Sales are aligned and eliminate finger-pointing by having the same, shared KPIs focused on revenue and pipeline growth.What are the Metrics that Matter to the Chief Marketing Officer cares about in 2024 and beyond? Kelly highlighted that revenue is the top shared goal for executive team members. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and the CAC Ratio + CAC Payback Period is an important metric to measure the efficiency of acquiring new customers. Beyond acquiring customers, Kelly highlighted that retaining customers is also important to ensure the investment in acquiring customers is best measured over the customer's lifetime and the associated Customer Lifetime Value.In today's more cautious capital reality, customers are focusing on not adding more vendors, thus the role of customer satisfaction is a role that Marketing is more focused on today and tomorrow to acquire, retain, and then EXPAND existing customer relationships. Kelly even highlighted that Net Revenue Retention is another important metric to both drive efficient revenue growth, but also to help identify and confirm the best ICP.How to measure the ROI on brand investment? One, is to see how organic "brand searches" are trending on Google + is inbound, click-through rates increasing. Then looking at down stream metrics like conversion rates, win rates and sales cycle time should be trending positively with an increased investment in brand - however it is important to note that some brand investments will be maximized over a longer term, but can be evaluated near term on some of the aforementioned leading indicator metrics.If you are interested in learning best practices on how a Chief Marketing Officer uses metrics to optimize the return on marketing investment in customer acquisition and customer expansion, this conversation with Kelly Hopping, Chief Marketing Officer at Demandbase is a great listen!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Philip Watson, the CFO at Paddle and formerly the head of FP&A at ZoomInfo discusses how the role of FP&A evolved at ZoomInfo from the early days up to and after their IPO.In addition, we cover a wide array of topics with Philip including:The evolution of FP&A at ZoomInfoHow the role of FP&A changes at different stages of growthFP&A as a foundation to the path of CFOIf you are interested in a financial executives view of a B2B technology company's evolution to IPO, and the role that a world class FP&A function plays in each stage of growth, this conversation with Philip Watson is chalked full of interesting insights and ideas!!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Manny Medina, the founder and CEO of Outreach discusses the state of B2B Sales, the future of sales execution software and how AI will impact both.Manny shares the Outreach vision is to unlock the full potential of B2B Sales professionals and to unlock the selling potential of every seller.During this episode, we discuss the following topics:State of B2B Sales and productivity heading into 2024The increased need for adding value in each buyer interactionThe metrics to measure sales productivity increaseThe potential impact of AI on B2B SalesManny highlighted that it is very tough out there for sales reps, and the need to be laser focused on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) which will lead to increased sales efficiency. Investing a sales professional's time on the target customer segments with the highest potential to become a customer is key to efficient revenue growth. Marketing is having a much harder time on cutting through the noise, and as such Sales needs to be much more focused in which leads and opportunities they pursue.Cold calling or emailing will fail if not of high value to the target prospect. For any considered purchase, the number of people in the buying process has increased, as such the number of people a sales rep must reach out to has materially increased, and the sales rep with a strong and high value point of value will stand out! As an example, Outreach focuses on the sales outreach process during customer on-boarding to increase the chances for increased sales outreach productivity for their customers.What are the Return on Investment metrics to use when investing in a piece of sales technology? Manny answered by looking at the entire sales process and the need to identify the specific steps in the sales process that is not working. Often, when companies assessment the problem in the sales process, it is critical to be very specific in the "problem" and start by focusing there, and determining the metric(s) that best measure the current state of that specific step.Manny expanded this topic by highlighting that we are asking sales managers to do even more work due to the increased number of sales technologies used, highlight the need to listen to "recorded calls" due to the pervasive use of conversational intelligence. This is an example of an area that needs to be evaluated so sales managers can spend more time coaching.Where is AI going to have the largest impact on sales productivity? Manny predicts there is no future without every sales professional having a AI assistant. The "AI assistant" will help the sales professional optimize how and where they invest their time, essentially reducing the amount of wasted effort spent on low value activities and opportunities.Another key area to benefit from AI will be predicting customer churn and then providing insights into how best to mitigate churn on an account by account basis. This led to the use of AI to increase forecast accuracy - which Manny started by highlighting that predictive forecasting is very hard due to the fast moving dynamics in the market. Using historical information to forecast can provided false positives due to changing market dynamics today. A better approach to use AI to analyze each opportunity today, and by using opportunity variables coupled with AI using large language models will increase forecasting accuracy.If you have a B2B sales organization and you are looking for opportunities to increase their sales productivity, this conversation with Manny Medina, Founder and CEO of Outreach is a great listen!!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
You Mon Tsang is the founder and CEO of ChurnZero. During this episode, You Mon and our host, Ray Rike discuss the following topics:How the role of Customer Success has evolved over the past 12 - 24 monthsHow the measurements used to determine CS ROI have evolvedThe top three metrics that You Mon recommends for Customer Success teamsThe catalyst for founding ChurnZero began when he was a Marketing leader and had a large selection of technologies to automate, manage, and measure marketing performance. When You Mon assumed responsibility for Customer Success, he quickly realized that there was not a large number of options to automate, manage, and measure Customer Success.One of the major changes in Customer Success is the evolution of focusing primarily on Net Revenue Retention (NRR), which is a top two company-level metric. During the SaaS recession of 2022-2023, You Mon was an increased focus on Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) which measures a company's ability to retain a customer on an ARR basis, independent of including expansion ARR. Retaining customers today is the key to a strong foundation for growth in the future.What leading indicators are most predictive of GRR? You Mon highlighted NPS, Customer Health Score, and product utilization as good leading indicators...however, the "health" of the customer is an important external variable that is harder to know but is still highly impactful to Gross Revenue Retention.  How does a CS organization's ability to determine "customer-verified outcomes" impact customer retention? You mentioned that verifying customer outcomes is very hard to measure. It is an admirable goal, and when your product natively impacts direct outcomes it is much easier.Is Customer Success a cost center or a profit center? Often this is associated with where Customer Success expenses are recorded...Cost of Goods Sold or Operating Expense? You Mon highlighted that the majority of his customers place CS expenses in Operating Expenses and thus should be measured by expense vs revenue retained and expanded.If you are a CEO, CFO, or CRO responsible for maximizing the return on investment for Customer Success, this is a great episode. If you are a Customer Success professional, You Mon shares some unique ideas and a vision for the future of Customer Success which will be a great addition to how you currently view Customer Success.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Helen Lin is the founder and CEO of Discern. As a business end-user of business performance data, she discovered that the data required for analysis was locked in the system of records, such as the CRM, ERP, or HCM. This required a dedicated team of analysts to identify the source of the required data, a process to extract the data from the system of records before they could even begin the process of analyzing the data.  During this episode, we cover three main areas with Helen:The challenges with managing the customer acquisition funnel in 2023How full-funnel analytics impacts GTM efficiencyWhat is the future of full-funnel analytics2023 was the year of efficiency, especially in the Go-to-Market functions. One of the key GTM efficiency metrics is the CAC Payback Period which measures how many months are required to payback the cost of acquiring a customer, after factoring in the Gross Margin. Marketing departments focused on the cost per lead, coupled with the associated conversion rates while Sales departments were laser-focused on productivity per sales rep, including an enhanced focus on average sales price per deal.Helen dove into the challenges of measuring "cost per x" due to the difficulty in assessing the cost data which is often locked in the human capital management and/or core financial platforms.A key point that Helen highlighted is that "growth" has re-emerged as the number one factor in enterprise value to revenue multiples, which suggests a heightened focus on Sales and Marketing investments and the associated returns.Full funnel analytics goes beyond new customer opportunity inspection or pipeline inspection, and provides a full picture of how the end-to-end funnel is performing from initial lead creation to Closed-Won ARR through customer retention and expansion. The role of management and Revenue Operations is to identify the areas, often the bottlenecks that negatively impact funnel conversion performance.Helen provided a customer example that assessed the profitability of each customer segment. The analysis went beyond measuring just customer acquisition performance and extended the analysis to include both churn rates and expansion ARR by segment. That analysis resulted in identifying a customer that was not profitable and thus ended all future investments in acquiring customers in that segment.  Marketing and Sales currently have a difficult time assessing the data that highlights how each unique stage of the customer acquisition process performs as measured by conversion rates to the next stage and simultaneously how much time a lead or opportunity remains in the same stage. One primary example is that many companies experience 80% of deals forecasted to close in the current quarter being pushed to a subsequent quarter. Another key metric is "Win-Rate" which is not a point-in-time measurement, rather it is a range that evolves over the period that opportunities remain in the pipeline.IF you are a Go-to-Market leader or the CEO or CFO of a B2B SaaS company, this discussion with Helen on the need and approaches to better understand the entire customer's journey from acquisition to retention to expansion + customer segment profitability, this conversation with Helen Lin, Founder and CEO of Discern.io is a great listen!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Randy Wootton, the CEO of Maxio is a multiple-time B2B SaaS CEO. However, his current role is unique in that within six months of taking on the role, the existing company which was the combination of two well-known companies (SaaS Optics and Chargify) decided to rebrand as Maxio and doing this during the great SaaS market correction started in the 2H-22.During this episode shared his experienced-based insights as a multiple-time B2B SaaS CEO including:Re-branding two combined B2B SaaS companies into a new single brandInsights into Achieving Efficient Growth During Uncertain TimesBalancing Growth and ProfitabilityMetrics Operators and Investors Can Agree UponMaxio is a combination of SaaS Optics and Chargify. Each company was very similar as measured by size, and number of customers and was viewed as a "Merger of Equals". As such, when combining these two companies neither was viewed as the acquiring company, so Randy needed to chart the course to combine two very equal companies, to gain both operating efficiency and market scale.Randy's first introduction was being a Maxio customer and appreciated how it made him more prepared to manage the business in near real-time, close the books, and then prepare the financial reports for the board without the stress of last-minute, manual processes. In Randy's words, Maxio provided him with a business radar, calling upon his experience as a naval aviator...and was the perfect foundation to become the Maxio CEO.On the topic of launching a new brand, Randy shared the jury is still out on whether this was the best strategy versus doubling down on one of the existing brands. One of the biggest challenges is building back and upon the SaaS Optics and Chargify brand awareness.The next topic Randy and I covered was the simultaneous challenge of balancing profitability and growth amid the great B2B SaaS recession over the last 18 months. Randy started by discussing their core target market is other B2B SaaS companies, primarily in the SMB market segment, which has been the segment most impacted by the current trends in growth and capital availability for SMB companies. Initially, Randy had to pivot to get the company profitable, and then be focused on determining which ICP(s) to target and what is the optimal Customer Acquisition Cost investment, while balancing growth and profitability.Randy highlighted that while growth is still a priority over profitability, it is critical to reach profitability to control your destiny versus being beholden to external capital sources. This is especially important during a lower growth external environment, which allows the strongest and most well-prepared companies to begin accelerating growth investments in alignment with external market conditions.Lastly, Randy highlighted the two SaaS Metrics that Maxio and Battery Ventures use to collaborate on analyzing efficient growth metrics and their trends. One is the Blended CAC Ratio which measures the expenses in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success divided by New ARR from both new name customers and existing customers expansion. Trying to get to a Blended CAC Ratio of 1 - which means $1 of Sales and Marketing Expenses to acquirSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Peter Berg, Managing Partner at M12 - the Microsoft corporate venture capital arm joins our host, Ray Rike to discuss the trends and measurements of success in venture capital inside Microsoft.Topics that Peter provide deep insights into included:The role of Corporate Venture Capital - insight from Visa and MicrosoftThe evolution of venture investing in 2024 and beyondMega-trends that will shape the future of technology investing Top 3 Cloud/SaaS Industry forecasts for 2024If you are interested in how large technology companies use a captive internal VC organization to drive strategy, ecosystem reach and financial returns simultaneously this conversation with Peter Berg, Managing Partner at M12 - the VC arm of Microsoft is highly educational and entertaining!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Kevan Savage, Principal of the Marketing practice at the Alexander Group shares the results of the research and associated report from the Alexander Group - Unveiling Pipeline to Profits with our host, Ray Rike. The report highlights the trends in demand generation and the associated return on investment of those changes. Key topics discussed during this episode include:Marketing expense trends as a % of RevenueAllocation of Marketing investments for Demand GenerationPipeline contribution by sourceFull conversion benchmarks from Marketing Qualified Leads to RevenueAs companies model and plan for next year - this episode is chalked full of the latest trends, budgets and Return on Investment by company size and is a great listen for CMOs, CEOs and CFOs as they focus on efficiency growth strategies, and tactics.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Phil Pergola, CEO at CloudZero shares his unique insights into how to better understand, manage, and reduce the Cost of Goods Sold associated with using Cloud Computing infrastructure for B2B SaaS applications. During this episode Phil and our host, Ray Rike discuss the following topics:Cloud Cost Trends as a percentage of the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)Reducing Cloud costs techniques beyond vendor negotiationHow to identify Cloud cost-saving opportunitiesGross Margins in the B2B SaaS industry have remained fairly stable over the past 10 years - so why focus on Cloud costs? The second largest expense for most B2B SaaS companies are human resource costs (#1) and then cloud delivery costs which are continuing to increase as the number of cloud infrastructure vendors is expanding to new tools like observability, data analytics, and security tools.There are three things that primarily drive cloud costs: 1) SW Architecture; 2) Pricing model(s) offered by vendors and used by customers; and 3) Actual Cloud usage which is directly driven by engineering decisions and customer utilization patterns. Taking a closer look at #1 and #3 is a missed opportunity in the majority of digital product providers.Why is it that COGS is often a secondary expense item that CEOs and CFOs focus on? First, it is typically seen as the domain of the CTO and engineering teams, and it is very hard to allocate discrete costs in the product infrastructure which contribute to non-optimized cloud consumption patterns.If you are looking for new and innovative ways to increase efficiency in those areas which can result in increased Gross Profit - then this is a great listen to understand the most recent trends and techniques for controlling your ever-growing Cloud costs!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
On this episode, we are joined by Udi Ledergor, the Chief Marketing Officer at GONG responsible for first creating the Conversational Intelligence category and then again in creating the Revenue Intelligence category resulting in one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies in history.In this episode, Udi highlights the evolving strategy and measurements for the Marketing organization at Gong along the growth journey to greater than $100M ARR and a $6B+ in company value!Creating a category builds the overall Target Addressable Market (TAM) - creating a brand increases the percentage of the TAM the category leader captures. Gong's journey and Udi's role in building their success is a valuable lesson chalked full of great ideas, insights and experiences!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Dave Kellogg is the author of Kellblog, Executive in Residence at Balderton Capital, multiple time SaaS CEO, investor and an OG for all things SaaS Metrics. During this episode, which is from his presentation at SaaS Metrics Palooza 23', Dave shares his insights and best practices on presenting SaaS metrics like a pro - especially to board members and investors. Ten mistakes that many make in presenting SaaS Metrics include:Amateur presentationCherry-picking Mis-benchmarkingOmitting contextPiecemealingDumping Smooth operatorForgetting questionMissing investor point of viewRetinal burnThis episode is chalked full of details, nuances and insight. If you would like to see the slides that Dave uses to guide this session at SaaS Metrics Palooza 23' you can download them at:benchmarkit.ai/saas-metrics-palooza-23-1/how-to-present-and-analyze-saas-metrics-like-a-proSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Science of Scaling, was a session delivered by Mark Roberge at SaaS Metrics Palooza 23'. In this episode, Mark discusses a math centric approach to determine if Product-Market Fit has been achieved, when to scale GTM investment and how much to invest in growth.Key concepts introduced include:How to use a mathematical formula to determine if Product-Market Fit is achieved (PET Metric)The leading indicators (unit economics) that inform increasing investment in customer acquisitionNorth Star metrics used by leading B2B SaaS companies to measure Product-Market FitThe power and competitive advantage of capturing daily leading indicators to scale economicsIf you prefer to watch the entire session and see the associated slides - the video can be seen at:https://bit.ly/SaaSMetricsPaloozaMarkRobergeIf you are asking questions such as: 1) Have we reached product-market fit; 2) Should we invest more to scale customer acquisition; 3) How much and how quickly should we invest more capital to accelerate growth then this episode is a must listen!!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chad Gold, the CFO at B2B SaaS Sales Engagement Platform leader Salesloft, shares how the role of a SaaS CFO has evolved over the last few years.Chad and the Metrics that Measure Up podcast host, Ray Rike discuss the following topics during this episode:How the B2B SaaS CFO role has evolvedHow performance metrics are used to manage and report on the businessHow performance metrics are used for budgeting and planningHow the B2B SaaS CFO Role will evolve over the next few yearsChad started his career as a corporate finance analyst at Ernst and Young (EY) and then migrated to the Home Depot in a variety of financial roles that built his foundation into the strategic side of finance. Chad's first B2B technology job was at Ariba, a division of SAP where he was able to apply his FP&A experience in a technology company. Chad has been the Salesloft CFO for 5 years and has seen the company grow by 10x including a majority investment by Vista Equity.Chad shared his "lines not dots" which means the ability to meet people and then foster relationships with them over time is a key to being exposed to different opportunities which is how Chad transitioned into the B2B Technology industry.Chad highlighted that his role as a CFO has not evolved that much over the last couple of years, beyond being asked to help identify those aspects of the business that are best positioned to drive efficient growth especially now that capital is more difficult to secure, and thus difficult capital allocation decisions are more important in 2023 than they were in 2020 - 2022.What are "Chad's" go-to metrics? He started at a high level with momentum and velocity metrics like the ARR funnel, new booking, churn, expansions, and the leading indicators of pipeline and customer health. Chad highlighted the importance of the number of integrations to other systems which is a great indicator of retention!He also highlighted his engagement with the key GTM functions, such as the Customer Success function to understand product engagement and utilization as an early indicator of churn and/or expansion - thus providing early visibility into making better forecasts. Chad used the term "you can read the news or make the news" which is how he approaches partnering with the other members of the executive team to ensure how the leading indicators metrics are performing, and even how to enhance their performance which will lead to better financial metrics outcomes.If you work with a CFO in your business, would like to become a CFO or even just want to better understand CFO best practices to drive better financial results through cross-functional collaboration and of course...metrics this conversation with Chad Gold is a great listen!!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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