I’m pleased to announce that I was recently featured in a six-part SaaS podcast mini-series on SaaShimi hosted by Aznaur Midov, VP at PNC Technology Finance Group, a debt provider who works primarily with private equity (PE) firms for SaaS buyouts, growth capital, and recapitalizations.
Let’s talk first about the mini-series. It’s quite a line-up:
- A Brief History of SaaS with Phil Wainewright, co-founder of Diginomica and recognized authority on cloud computing.
- Key SaaS Metrics with me.
- Building a Sales Org with Jacco van der Kooij, founder and CEO of Winning by Design
- Building a Marketing Org with my old friend Tracy Eiler, CMO at InsideView and author of Aligned to Achieve, a book on aligning sales and marketing.
- Building a Customer Success Org with Ed Daly, SVP of Customer Success and Growth at Okta.
- Raising Capital with my friend Bruce Cleveland, partner at Wildcat Ventures and former operational executive at Oracle and Siebel.
The series is available on RedCircle, Apple podcasts, and Spotify.
Now, let’s talk about my episode. The first thing you’ll notice is Aznaur did the interviews live, with a high-quality rig, and you can hear it in the audio which is much higher quality than the typical podcast.
In terms of the content, Aznaur did his homework, came prepared with a great set of questions in a logical order, and you can hear that in the podcast. His goal was to do an interview that effectively functioned as a “SaaS Metrics 101” class and I think he succeeded.
Here is a rough outline of the metrics we touched on in the 38-minute episode:
- ARR vs. ACV (annual recurring revenue vs. annual contract value)
- ARR vs. MRR (ARR vs. monthly recurring revenue)
- TCV (total contract value)
- RPO (remaining performance obligation)
- Bookings
- Average contract duration (ACD)
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio
- CAC Payback Period
- Renewal and churn rates
- ARR- vs. ATR-based churn rates (ATR = available to renew)
- Compound vs. standalone metrics
- Net dollar expansion rate (NDER)
- Survivor bias in churn rates
- The problem with long customer lifetimes (due to low churn rates)
- LTV/CAC (LTV = lifetime value)
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- The loose correlation between NPS and renewals
- Intent to renew
- Billings
- Services gross margin
- Cash burn rate
- The investor vs. the operator view on metrics
I listened to your section and it was really good, thanks for sharing (the others were also quite interesting). Please ask your friend to treat you to coffee as I ordered the book “aligned to achieve” off amazon
I was wondering if you would be so kind as to write a post on budgeting in the future (when to start budgeting, how etc) and when one should “re-budget” (I assume this has to do with pipeline velocity in b2b saas world).
Thanks again for sharing this great content and hope to read more soon! :)
Thanks for the book recommendation! I started diib.com a few years back and we actually moved away from a human sales team and more into automation. That said, the alignment between our automated sales messaging and marketing needed a second look. Great resources here.
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